When AWS, Azure, or GCP Becomes the Competition
While AWS has ruffled a bunch of feathers with their Elasticsearch and Kafka managed offerings which can be easily construed as attempts to steam roll the respective open source-first entities, I am actually quite impressed by the mechanism that Azure has employed with Azure Managed Applications: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/managed-applications/.... Hashicorp recently announced their collaboration with Azure to bring forth managed consul offering using this: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-consul-service-on-...This in my opinion is the right way to solve the problem, i.e. provide the customers that want a managed offering the means to get a managed version directly from the entity most active behind the project, (e.g. Hashicorp) while getting the most from the cloud provider's infrastructure. I would be willing to trust Confluent or Hashicorp with operating/managing my Kafka or consul cluster but taking another dependency on their respective cloud offerings should be of concern.I am quite surprised that its Azure that has shown creativity here while AWS and Google have limited themselves to offering marketplace AMIs/images at ridiculous markups.