The value proposition of support contracts

As I look around the industry with an eye towards further employment, I've noticed a difference of philosophy between startups and the more established players. One easy way to see this difference is on their job postings.

  • If it says RHEL and VMWare on it, they believe in support contracts.
  • If it says CentOS and OpenStack on it, they believe in community support.

For the same reason that tech startups almost never use Windows if they can get away with it, they steer clear of other technologies that come with license costs or mandatory support contracts. Why pay the extra support cost when you can get the same service by hiring extremely smart people and use products with a large peer support community? Startups run lean, and all that extra cost is... cost.

And yet some companies find that they prefer to run with that extra cost. Some, like StackExchange, don't mind the extra licensing costs of their platform (Windows) because they're experts in it and can make it do exactly what they want it to do with a minimum of friction, which means the Minimum Viable Product gets kicked out the door sooner. A quicker MVP means quicker profitability, and that can pay for the added base-cost right there.

Other companies treat support contracts like insurance: something you carry just in case, as a hedge against disaster. Once you grow to a certain size, business continuity insurance investments start making a lot more sense. Running for the brass ring of market dominance without a net makes sense, but once you've grabbed it keeping it needs investment. Backup vendors love to quote statistics on the percentage of business that fail after a major data-loss incident (it's a high percentage), and once you have a business worth protecting it's good to start protecting it.

This is part of why I'm finding that the long established companies tend to use technologies that come with support. Once you've dominated your sector, keeping that dominance means a contract to have technology experts on call 24/7 from the people who wrote it.

"We may not have to call RedHat very often, but when we do they know it'll be a weird one."


So what happens when startups turn into market dominators? All that no-support Open Source stuff is still there...

They start investing in business continuity, just the form may be different from company to company.

  • Some may make the leap from CentOS to RHEL.
  • Some may contract for 3rd party support for their OSS technologies (such as with 10gen for MongoDB).
  • Some may implement more robust backup solutions.
  • Some may extend their existing high-availability systems to handle large-scale local failures (like datacenter or availability-zone outages).
  • Some may acquire actual Business Continuity Insurance.

Investors may drive adoption of some BC investment, or may actively discourage it. I don't know, I haven't been in those board meetings and can argue both ways on it.

Which one do I prefer?

Honestly, I can work for either style. Lean OSS means a steep learning curve and a strong incentive to become a deep-dive troubleshooter of the platform, which I like to be. Insured means someone has my back if I can't figure it out myself, and I'll learn from watching them solve the problem. I'm easy that way.