Lightningstream incremental synchronization

[victoredvardsson]

Hello!

I just read the blog post about some exciting new features in Lightningstream for enterprise. Especially the incremental synchronization feature, is that something that will be ported to the community version as well going forward?

Thanks!

[bobdeschot]

Hello!

Good question! I can imagine there might be some questions about what this "Enterprise" version of Lightning Stream is, how it differs from "regular" Lightning Stream and what the relationship is between them.

When we were debating open-sourcing Lightning Stream, inevitably the challenge known to all OSS shops came up: how do you encourage commercial entities to (continue to) pay for your software once it's effectively freely available to use? This comes up in commercial discussions depressingly often. So the approach we decided to take is to chose a license that would allow us to introduce 2 parallel development tracks:

• An open-source version of Lightning Stream that contains all the functionality people would need. Nothing crippled or missing, full-featured by any reasonable assessment.
• A commercial ("Enterprise") version of Lightning Stream that builds upon the OSS with features that you need at any kind of scale, i.e. commercial applications. The incremental updates is the first commercial feature and thus this is why nobody had yet heard of Lightning Stream Enterprise.

I have some sympathy for those who would say their small-scale LS deployment would "work better" with incremental updates. Any person serious about computers and networks loves optimisation, seeks it out. But it's only a must-have if you are doing things at scale, and if you are doing things at scale, it is almost certainly commercial, and so there is a business case to be made.

I want to stress that OSS Lightning Stream is not abandoned. It will continue to be maintained and improved, new features added. And not as an afterthought, as it is and will continue to be the foundation of the Enterprise version. But any time we think of a new feature that a commercial customer would need while being a nice-to-have for smaller deployments, that feature will find its way into the Enterprise version.

I hope this clears things up!