Redis relicensed and came back, Vault went BSL, MinIO stopped maintaining its community edition, and AWS kept adding managed versions of the open-source tools. How to decide service by service, with the licence changes that matter and twelve head-to-head comparisons.
For almost every managed service on AWS there is an open-source project you could run on Kubernetes instead: S3 or self-hosted object storage, RDS or a Postgres operator, Secrets Manager or Vault, Step Functions or Temporal. The argument usually splits into "managed services are expensive lock-in" against "running it ourselves is a distraction", and both sides are right about something.
Three years of licence changes have added a third consideration: the open-source option is not always as open, or as maintained, as it was when you adopted it.
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From each project's and vendor's own announcements.
The pattern: a project with one commercial owner can change its terms; a project governed by a foundation with several companies behind it rarely does. That is not a reason to avoid single-vendor projects, but it is a reason to know which kind you depend on.
Does it hold data you cannot lose? Then the bar for self-hosting is very high: replication, tested restores, upgrades and someone on call who knows the system. Managed wins unless the next questions force otherwise.
Must it run outside AWS — another cloud, on-premises, a customer's environment, the edge? Then open source on Kubernetes is usually the only portable option.
Is it differentiating? If running it better than AWS would make your product better, own it. If not, rent it.
At your scale, does per-use pricing cross the cost of running it yourself — including people? For API gateways, identity and some databases, it eventually does. For most other things, not until you are very large.
Who will own it in two years? A self-hosted system whose expert left is the most expensive kind.
Each row has its own detailed comparison on our comparisons page.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.