We begged Datastax to provide a managed service in AWS. We used Datastax for consulting and for their repackaging of Cassandra with admin tools. After perpetual pain with Cassandra management, and little belief that Datastax would enter the market for managed services, we eventually decided to stop everything and rewrite to Dynamo.

Datastax was undeniably a beneficial force behind earlier cassandra, and I initially thought the Apache board pseudo-ejecting them from the project governance was foolish, but I do think they were starting to mess with cassandra a bit too much.

They can probably support their product line atop this just fine. They really make their money on integrating cassandra and a bunch of other big data frameworks in one neat little package.

I usually stay away from politics but the Apache Cassandra is doing just fine after DataStax was ejected. If you pay any attention to the current Cassandra development in the community, you’ll notice an increased focus on stability, testing and operational excellence.

Disclosure: I work for AWS, but this is my personal opinion.

I don't know of any company "killed" by AWS, and I don't think that Datastax will be either.

Heh you don’t know about them because they don’t exist anymore.

I know at least three founders who had to shut down after AWS launched a feature at re:invent.

One went on to start another company that was acquired by Facebook in an 8 figure deal.

Were they in angel / seed rounds? Which AWS features?

AWS contributes very little to open source and takes all the SaaS profits from the project founders.