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RavenDB 4.0 Release Candidate Updates
We are on the verge of releasing RavenDB 4.0 release candidate, currently the release is set to mid next week but we’re close enough that I can smell it. Once the release pressure is off, I can start discussing more of the things that we bring to the table.
For the record, we are now standing on less then 30 remaining issues before we can ship RC, most of them relating to licensing. And speaking of this, we made a couple of decisions lately that you should probably know about.
First, we are switching to the RavenDB 4.0 pricing starting next week, for the period of the RC, we’ll even go with 30% discount. In other words, you can do a bit of arbitrage and get a license now at the old pricing, we’ll grandfather in all existing orders when we make the switch.
Second, regarding the free community edition. After a lot of deliberations, I decided that community edition as we wanted to offer it made no sense. RavenDB 4.0 is a distributed, robust database, and we want to encourage people to use us in real world settings. Because of that, we decided to scrap the limits on running the community edition as a cluster. This means that you’ll be able to deploy a full blown RavenDB cluster for production using just the community edition.
Third, we decided to change the pricing model a bit. Instead of you purchasing a license per server, which caused a lot of back & forth between our sales people and customers, we decided to move to a flat per core model. In other words, if you need to deploy 3 node cluster with 4 cores each, you’ll purchase a cluster license for 12 cores. You could then deploy that cluster on up to 12 machines (with 1 core assigned for each machine in this case). This simplify things significantly and it gives a lot more flexibility to the operations team.
Here is a rough draft of what this would look like. You can see a 16 cores cluster license and that we assigned 3 cores to Node A.
The community edition we’ll provide will have 3 cores and a maximum of 3 nodes in the cluster. This will allow you to have a single RavenDB node, or a cluster of three nodes with one core each, given you high availability, automatic failover, etc. There are still things that aren’t in the free edition (ETL, cloud backups, monitoring, support, etc) but the idea is that you could run real things on the free edition and that you could upgrade when your needs actually require it.
I’m really excited about this because it means that features that are currently Enterprise only are now pushed all the way to the community edition. This gives you the chance to use a world class distributed database that was built with an explicit design goal of being correct, fast and easy to use.
Comments
Hi Oren,
Good news about the upcoming RC... looking forward to it. I have a question about how the 'grandfathering' will work. If I went to the ravendb.net site now, I could buy a Standard Edition license that has up to 12GB RAM and 6 Cores and pay $698 per year (includes RavenFS which is being discontinued). What license would that entitle me to in the new world? We also already have a few of these subscriptions I believe. Or, if I decided to buy a few more licenses now in anticipation of adding more servers soon (without RavenFS) then what would the equivalent be?
There was a Hot Spare option before - what happens there now if I want an Active / Passive solution? Assume it is a full license as part of a cluster?
Cheers,
Ian
Ian, We'll consolidate all of your licenses into a single cluster license with the number of cores that you have in total. Hot spare will not be considered for this (to be rather more exact, hot spare will likely transition for a witness license, but we won't have that for the 4.0 RTM).
That is why I mention arbitrage, it make sense to buy them now :-)
Ian, Note however that the license is limited by the number of total nodes in the cluster. So buying 10 x 698$ licenses for a total of 60 cores will give you a cluster license for 60 cores on a maximum of 5 nodes, not 10.
Ok, that's a little bit scary though Oren... that assumes that we have a single RavenDB installation which is not the case.
For example, let's assume we had a server in AWS Ireland, one in AWS Virginia and another on-premise at a client installation. These are not part of the same cluster and I wouldn't want them to be. So therefore we can't upgrade to RavenDB 4.0 even if we buy extra licenses now without shelling out more money on the new model (because you conslidate everything to a single cluster). Something not right there (maybe I'm missing something)....
Ian, There are two options here, given the grandfathering. We can provide multiple cluster licenses, obviously, but we can also support (this will be done by the RTM) a single license that is actually used in more than a single cluster. The basic idea is that you have N cores total, and we don't really care how you split them, among nodes in a cluster or among clusters.
This give you flexibility to say "oh, I have much higher load at Ireland, let us shift some of the cores there" and just do that without getting into the licensing.
That said, note that failover will only work withing a cluster boundary, not between clusters.
Ok, that's a relief... so basically, buy as much as I think we'll need for growth for the next few years by the end of today and all looks good :-)
Favour, can someone contact me from HR and let me know the status of our subscriptions and renewal dates etc. and I'll start the dialog?
Ian, Certainly.
Wow, awesome news about clustering working with even the community version. I like this idea, because it will encourage the free users to use all the features of Raven including all the new clustering goodness.
Really looking forward to 4.0!
Oren, yes a thousand times. This is really good.
This looks great!
Will RavenDB limit itself to the number of cores available in the license no matter how many cores is available in Computer? So is it for example is possible to deploy RavenDB on more powerful servers that for example run multiple other services beside RavenDB and therefor use more cores, but you will not get in trouble with RavenDB license because it limits itself to the licenses cores? Will also be great for community version, because you can of course use virtual machines, but otherwise it is hard to find computers today with one 1 core.
Henrik, Yes, you can run RavenDB on more powerful machines and it will only use the cores that it is licensed to.
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