Friday, March 23, 2012

Your data is owned by you!

We did a major change recently. You may notice on our login screen that you are no longer require a Twitter account to sign-up. Now you need a Github account. There are two reasons behind this change:

If you have a github account, then you are most probably a developer, more over you are a good developer with an understanding for open source and open collaboration. So, we want you to try elastic.io.
We don’t want to lock your data in our databases.

Last point is very important for us. We believe in data portability. In the world of SaaS and online platforms like Google, Facebook, etc. (private) data is very important. So we don’t want to lock your (flows) data in our systems, therefore now we store them as Github Gists!

That’s how Github describes gists:

Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as a git repository.

You can create, edit, delete your gists. Gists could be public or private. And the most interesting of all you can fork other people’s (public) gists!

For example check this out:

https://gist.github.com/2161825

This integration flow loaded in the Designer will looks like this:

With this new storage you own your flows. The flow data is stored and available under your Github account. You can also see full history information and forks other people did on your gists!

It’s also important to note that now (just as before) your integration flows contain no private information like usernames, password, OAuth keys, etc. So you can easily share them with other people (as long as Gist that you create are public).

So if you want to try it out, register for our private beta on: http://elastic.io