My talk from Open Source Summit Paris 2016, on how our multi-cloud second generation PaaS, Platform.sh allows any Open Source vendor to create a sustainable non-evil SaaS model and what this means for enterprise customers. How Control and Productivity can be aligned.

1. Presented by
Ori Pekelman | Co-Founder & VP of Marketing |
ori@platform.sh | https://platform.sh
SAAS IS THE ENEMY OF OPEN SOURCE
GOOD THING THAT WE ARE IN THE POST-SAAS ERA

2. ÉDITION 2016 | 16&17 NOVEMBRE
#OSSPARIS16
SAAS IS THE ENEMY OF OPEN SOURCE
GOOD THING THAT WE ARE IN THE POST-SAAS ERA

3. Horizon 2020's SME Instrument laureate
Concours d’Innovation Numérique laureate

4. ControlProductivity
Shared Dedicated

5. ControlProductivity
Shared Dedicated
Self-Hosted Open SourceGoogle owns your soul and first born

6. #OSSPARIS16
Software has eaten the world and the web has eaten
software; The last ten years were the SaaS era.

7. #OSSPARIS16
➔ But hidden. Running in the background.
➔ Not the software end-users use.
➔ Without the promise of liberty.
➔ It killed proprietary software, but left us, both
individuals and companies no better for it.
In the meantime Open Source won.

8. #OSSPARIS16
Standardisation won over NIH,
commoditization won over the snowflake
industry.
Why is SaaS winning?

9. #OSSPARIS16
Economy of scale simply made it less and less
rational to invest in in-house custom built
software that is subpar.

10. #OSSPARIS16
And from SMEs to the large enterprise, often reluctantly,
IT was forced to let go of bespoke development of heavy
to install and maintain on-premise solution and replace
those by “best of breed solutions” from SaaS providers.

11. #OSSPARIS16
● Transforming Capex to Opex
● While reducing operating costs
● With improved Time To Market
● … and much superior user-experience.
Consumer technology basically won over the enterprise
one.
Because SaaS brought the promise of

12. #OSSPARIS16
Putting stuff, out-there, on the web, made
integrating silos ever simpler.
It was, and it is a rational choice.
Conjugated with a world of simpler APIs

13. #OSSPARIS16
Who in their right mind would choose Outlook
over gmail?

14. #OSSPARIS16
The horror of it was the loss of our privacy.
For us, individuals

15. #OSSPARIS16

16. #OSSPARIS16
● A total lack of control of the roadmap
● Inability to innovate beyond what everybody else has
● Lack of control of your data
● Vendor lock-in
● And once that one sank in, rising costs
For the enterprise, slowly, you
discovered you suffered from

17. #OSSPARIS16
If you are in industry that has not
yet “been disrupted”, and you are
not the “disruptor”, your company’s
future is at highest risk.
And mind you, there will be no non-digital
enterprises.

18. #OSSPARIS16
What the hmpfff are you talking about?
97% of software we run is proprietary on-premise….
mixed with legacy bespoke …
If you have not yet seen the tidal wave of SaaS attack your
shores. It’s coming. And it will take 20 more years to bury the
old Microsoft. It’s still dead. Remember … Open-Source won.

19. #OSSPARIS16
And this is orthogonal to the cloud issue.
The question is Bespoke vs Universally shared.
The universally shared model, SaaS, is always
proprietary.
Not about Web Vs Legacy.

20. A quick story. We are using a well known SaaS product.
A A couple of days ago they said “hey you are using
180% of the allowed space. 1.8GB, we will shut down
your business critical system if you don’t upgrade”
I downloaded the whole dataset. 60MB compressed.
800MB. I could buy more space for 135$ / 500MB /
Month.

21. This is VS 0.03$ to buy and 1.5$/M to rent from AWS.
So sometimes using SaaS means, if they can, they would
make you pay the price of 20 years ago.
I mean 1996 GB.
WTF.

22. #OSSPARIS16
The pendulum has swung so far to the services side that
companies, without even knowing it, become subservient,
on the long-run they would discover that they are now
vassals.

23. #OSSPARIS16
● The SaaS model has not even showed all of it’s muscles.
● Because machine learning techniques are still in their
infancy.
● A solution that has not only scale in operations and
development costs but also in understanding will become
harder and harder to beat.
Because it’s not even about the code.
It is about DATA.

24. #OSSPARIS16
But Open Source won, didn’t it?
● Most of the code running SaaS solutions (like anything
else) uses Open Source.
● Much of it GPL.
● But the end result has even worse effects than running
proprietary on-premise.

25. #OSSPARIS16
Infrastructure level Open Source has no
problem
● Google, Microsoft and IBM are more than happy to
contribute
● There are of course examples (shout-out to Gitlab), but
these are rare.

26. #OSSPARIS16
It’s the end-user Open Source projects that
suffer
● These are the ones that matter to our liberty and
privacy.
● And it is very hard to monetize.

27. #OSSPARIS16
Why monetize? It’s all about the freedom, chill.

28. #OSSPARIS16
Why monetize? It’s all about the freedom, chill.
It’s 2016, we are no longer having this conversation.

29. #OSSPARIS16
Why monetize? It’s all about the freedom, chill.
It’s 2016, we are no longer having this conversation. Food.

30. #OSSPARIS16
Believe me, monetizing GPL, I know.
● At the foundation of Commerce Guys, an Open Source Vendor,
started around 2009.
● Drupal Commerce is fundamentally better than the other
e-commerce solutions out there.
● As first order of business we were going to beat Magento.
● Hugely successful (60,000 running sites. Big ones too).
● Big community, many contributions
● Even raised VC money.

31. #OSSPARIS16
Monetization Strategies
● Support
● Marketplace
● Professional services
● Hosted / SaaS version

32. #OSSPARIS16
Monetization Strategies
● Support - we didn’t make a broken product.
● Marketplace - took more than three years
● Professional services - worked. But that’s not scalable.
● Hosted / SaaS version - Shebang.

33. #OSSPARIS16
Monetization Strategies
● Support
● Marketplace
● Professional services
● Hosted / SaaS version - Shebang.

34. ControlProductivity
Shared Dedicated

35. #OSSPARIS16
Go SaaS!
● The problem was that a SaaS model just didn’t cut it.
● We could dumb down the solution to make it one shoe
fits all.
● But then.. it wouldn’t be any better. It was better
because it was open, a framework, easy to extend and
hack.

36. #OSSPARIS16
When SaaS won...
● There were economics reasons, but there were also technical
reasons for the world to have went SaaS
● Maintaining numerous large software projects was simply not
feasible with the technics of 10 years ago.
● Now with Git, Containers, Orchestration and lifecycle automation
technologies, we can suddenly benefit from the best of both worlds.

37. #OSSPARIS16
We knew that now it is possible to make
● A software platform that evolves continuously and that is cheap to
maintain and manage at scale (with true SLAs, scalability and all).
● On top of which you can do have your own innovative edge with
custom code
● The 95% of the code that is shared can be managed as cheaply as a
single monolithic SaaS solution.
● Git! Containers! Orchestration! Cloud!

38. Zero admin chores:
The most extreme
version of DevOps, is
NoOps
Git-driven infrastructure
With a single git push you can deploy an
arbitrarily complex cluster (with micro-services,
messages queues and the lot.)
Automated high-availability of everything
Everything is managed & automated: from the
network to the filesystem, from the build
process to deployment.
Multi-cloud, multi-app, multi-stack
With Sovereign Hosting as a feature
Deploy any PHP, Node.js, Python or Ruby
application.

39. BEYOND CLOUD HOSTING
Clone a byte-for-byte copy of your
production site in less than a minute.
➔ Every git branch has a url
➔ Eliminates QA bottlenecks
➔ 90% faster human testing and
validation
➔ Fail proof, predictable deployments
➔ Quick bug fixes and security release
resolution

40. #OSSPARIS16
This worked.
● It was hard work. Expensive work. Getting a 24/7/365 highly
available operation with support and billing infrastructure is not
cheap.
● But we discovered that the problem we were trying to solve for our
own Open Source solution, Drupal Commerce, was general.
● Our clients, asked us for what goddamn reason they couldn’t use this
for other Open Source projects.

41. #OSSPARIS16
… so Drupal Commerce is doing just fine
● A smaller company that focuses on the core product
● With a marketplace that works
● With many contributors
● Also selling expertise
● But we had to spin-off and sell that in order to go for the more
general solution

42. #OSSPARIS16
We didn’t beat our good open source friends
from Magento
● We joined forces. Now Magento Cloud runs on a white-label
Platform.Sh
● And eZ Platform
● And Typo 3
● And many small ones. Like Open Social from Goal Gorilla (shout-out!)
● Stay tuned for more in a couple of weeks. And then some more.

43. #OSSPARIS16
Simple projects, with important outcomes
● This allows Open Source vendors to compete with SaaS providers, on
the same terms
● Longest integration took 2 months. Quickest 2 weeks.
● Most OS vendors could not efford this. Or the solution they would
valiantly create will be subpar, and not scale.
● This is not only a boon for the vendors. Also for the myriad of open
source developers in these communities. Because it’s industrialized.

44. ControlProductivity
Shared Dedicated

45. #OSSPARIS16
The web won, and open source can still win the
important battle.
● But only if there is an operational model in which bespoke can
function at scale.
● It’s only when it is compatible with the world of APIs and Cloudy
Clouds.
● Only where even smaller Open Source vendors can monetize, at
scale, as a service.
● We still need to solve the Machine Learning thing though. Ideas?

46. #OSSPARIS16
In the Post SaaS Era
● We can have sustainable Open Source projects
● We can benefit from the shared while keeping control
● Control means innovation
● And Control means privacy

47. @platformsh
WANT TO CREATE A SAAS
SOLUTION?
COME TALK TO US.