🚨Nation-scale Matrix deployments will fail if built on the community version of Synapse.
The community version of Synapse is not designed or intended for use by commercial Matrix hosting providers to serve huge nation-scale deployments. Just as a suspension bridge has a weight limit and will collapse if you exceed it - the same goes for community Synapse.
Deployments supporting millions of users need Synapse Pro.
https://element.io/blog/scaling-to-millions-of-users-requires-synapse-pro/
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@element As a tax payer I want my government to use open source. Since Synapse Pro isn't, it's simply not usable for such cases.
Thank you for detailing the need for doing the same development to the open source Synapse as you have already done on Synapse Pro. I hope you do agree, it would be a pity to have to fork.
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@troed We'd also like everything to be open source. But the reality is that even with AGPL, we're still stuck in the pattern that enormous deployments use FOSS Synapse without contributing to its dev/maintenance costs.
Every time an opportunity that we're counting on to fund the team turns around and says "oh, FOSS Synapse is good enough, and we can use it for free, bye" we find ourselves needing to provide a very concrete reason not to freeride - hence Synapse Pro.
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@element Do you know of any successful open source businesses that have used this particular method?
"How to make money from FOSS" is an age old problem - but "the free version has a sucky implementation" is, afaik, not the most successful one.
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@troed we're not remotely trying to do "the free version has a sucky implementation". FOSS Synapse will keep improving, including perf (but not scalability) work. The model is more like MySQL Enterprise (back int he day). "If you want a massive cluster with a guaranteed SLA, here's our paid clustering product".
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@element Right, so let me make a quick rewrite:
"Scaling is hard!
We're seeing many successful Matrix deployments using Synapse for which we are extremely proud and happy. We're also seeing some running into scaling problems as they approach hundreds of thousands of users.
Element is here to help. We're the biggest contributor to the open source Synapse community, and as such we have unparalleled expertise when it comes to optimizing very large deployments. With our performance libraries, that are specifically crafted for Synapse deployments that can reach millions of users, we can get the performance of massive - and costly - server solutions down to something that's much more manageable.
If this is a good fit for your deployment plans, please reach out!"
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@troed that is a great pitch - and is fairly close to the original Synapse Pro announcement from https://element.io/blog/synapse-pro-slashes-costs-for-running-nation-scale-matrix-deployments/. The only problem is that then a bunch of big deployments said "that's nice, we'll risk it anyway". Hence the harsher "seriously, you will fail if you try to wing it" wording here.
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@element Ok so now I'll need to preface the next part: I am a former Head of SaaS that built a commercial product on top of a FOSS stack. We took the decision, multiple times, which parts to use as-is, which to pay for commercial support and what that cost/benefit looked like.
I'm sorry, you cannot scare potential customers into choosing your Pro product* over the FOSS offering. If they have the budget and their mission is clear, they will pay. If they don't, they'll need to miss their internal targets before they're able to acquire that budget.
The only thing you can do is to wish such a customer good luck, and then sneakily have your sales personnel check in every now and then. If your Pro product is cheaper for their use case, they will come back and pay you once they've figured out they weren't as smart as they hoped.
Now, I asterisked "your Pro product" - because the big difference between your original product announcement and my rewrite is how you phrase Synapse Pro as a different product and not just as paid consultancy/contract to optimize a Synapse deployment. That way you're basically telling your customer they have a one time choice between Pro and Community, and if they choose Community there's no easy "come help us!" path forwards once they run into scaling issues.
I do understand from this communication that things are tight though, and I truly hope that the EU, or individual governments, can finally understand that this is the area in which they should spend money. But, back the original post. As a dev, and former head of blabla, that post really came out as "we made the FOSS version sucky and put the good code into our proprietary product".
fwiw
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@troed yup your point makes sense - especially as Synapse Pro very much is designed to be dropped into speed up FOSS Synapse when needed. Well, we can always do a 3rd blog post with spin to see how it lands... :)
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@element @troed
Sell that product to private companies then, not to public institutions.
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