Interesting business model around a F/OSS project:<p><a href="https://databricks.com/try-databricks" rel="nofollow">https://databricks.com/try-databricks</a><p><a href="https://databricks.com/product/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://databricks.com/product/pricing</a><p>So, they give you a 6GiB of RAM "micro-cluster" (presumably in AWS) for free, along with a notebook environment for playing with Spark's API, learning resources, and a way to share your work. But if you go from DCE to "production", you pay $99/month as a license fee for up to 3 Spark users, plus $288/month for every AWS node you run full-time in your Spark cluster.<p>Presumably, Spark is able to treat the "free" 6 GiB micro clusters of the community edition as a customer acquisition cost (VC-funded loss leader) for eventual pro users, who, if they work at companies with huge data processing needs, might work out to thousands of dollars per month of recurring revenue.
Direct link to the signup page, if you don't care about the press release:
<a href="https://databricks.com/ce" rel="nofollow">https://databricks.com/ce</a>