Hi everyone, not sure this is the right channel 🙂 Orchest seems an amazing tool - but I see orchest cloud is being discontinued as of April. Are you able to share some insights about what's the path forward for sw development and business?

Its hard to pick the right channel for these types of questions anyways 😉 We will indeed sunset Orchest Cloud in April. The open source version of Orchest will remain available, but we will no longer actively develop it. In our eyes it is great software, but we were unable to build a successful company around it. Therefore we will focus our efforts elsewhere. You can totally self-host the open source version, but I would recommend going with an alternative solution that is still actively being developed/improved. Hope that answers your question 🙏

it does. Thank you for the transparency, that is greatly appreciated (and your amazing work too - it's great software in my eyes as well!), Actually, I do not know really comparable alternatives. Do you happen to have any suggestions?

Thank you for the kind words. I'd say it depends on your use case and on the person who would be maintaining and using the tool. There are solutions from the cloud providers like AWS Step Functions (AWS Glue), Azure Data Factory and GCP Workflows (purposefully mentioned a tool by each cloud provider). You can also go with self-hosting Airflow, using their managed version Astronomer, or going with the offering of Airflow by a cloud provider, e.g. MWAA. Depending on your situation I would probably pick from one of these.

Would love to talk to you about these and why I am interested in orchest, but I guess it's not the right moment and you might be already directing your energies elsewhere. Thank you again for your work and your attention

Hi @Yannick, I appreciate your previous response to Andrea listing alternatives to Orchest. I just came across the project and was so excited by the elegant UI and frictionless start. We’re a very lean team, so simplicity and ease of use are a huge priority for us. In addition to the services mentioned above I’ve also seen Flyte mentioned. It seems like perhaps the closest alternative, but I would be really interested to get your opinion on this.

It has been a while since I last checked out Flyte. My takeaway back then was that it targets companies that run at the scale of Spotify and that Flyte would need an "infra team" to manage the cluster. From their GitHub:

mission-critical data and ML processes at scale. It has been battle-tested at Lyft, Spotify

Given your point

We’re a very lean team, so simplicity and ease of use are a huge priority for us.

I don't think it makes sense to use Flyte.

Will orchest continue to be licensed as AGPL after the service shuts down? It's difficult to work with GPL licenses at my company, but it would be interesting to try and build on top of the work your team has already put in.

Interesting point! Let me have a chat internally and come back to you on this.

We'll consider an alternative then. When it comes to exploring platform solutions there is enough overhead in just evaluating them, and it's not worth the time investment to even try them it in the case where we'll also need to negotiate a license if they were to be a good fit. My company is happy to pay for services if there is a supported product that makes us more efficient, but since your cloud offering is being discontinued, the only way we could consider using it would be under a more open license that we could develop on top of. I hope that doesn't sound like I'm not considering your right to choose the license -- which obviously up to you -- but I thought I'd articulate how we have to make the decisions around platforms. If you're not monetizing it at this point, you might get wider adoption from the open source community if you changed the license, but maybe you have really good reasons for keeping it GPL that I'm not thinking of. I'm disappointed I came across Orchest just as you were shutting down the cloud offering -- looked like it has a really well thought out UX that I haven't seen from many other data pipelining platforms!

Totally understand where you are coming from and that using Orchest isn’t feasible for you under the current license. Appreciate your elaborate explanation! Hope you find an alternative that suits you well 😊