Rich said (in a random podcast, which was not widely circulated - possibly Cognicast) that their mission with Datomic Cloud was for it to be the easiest way to get started with clojure. He even used the word “Easy”! (unless i misremember, this needs to be checked). Anyway, Cloud had consumption based pricing and developers, companies, and even hobbyists are all accustomed to paying for managed cloud infrastructure. To me this seems like a viable strategy, and devs would have forgiven the previous licensing issues -- we just want to get paid to play with cool toys at work, you gotta work the money stuff out with the bosses.

The problem with Cloud was that it didn’t deliver on easy. It was not the Heroku they envisioned, rather it was a scary AWS amalgamation that required deep AWS knowledge to debug their CloudFormation templates to get it to work. This is not even really their fault!, as CloudFormation is a dumpster fire, there are much better cloud orchestration tools now. And while AWS's first few products were rock solid (S3, EC2, DynamoDB), around this time is when AWS turned on the enterprise growth machine and pivoted into box checking and everything cloud began to turn to quicksand underneath their feet.

On top of cloud quicksand, Datomic Cloud had technical scalability challenges which they brute force engineered through, motivating the architectural shift away from the easy synchronous/local entity api to the annoying async/remote client api, and then back again sorta with Ions -- but at the cost of, like, 3 years of product roadmap, during which time Typescript exploded in popularity, the serverless hype cycle began to break and SQL started making a comeback.

Also, the Java API had poor adoption. selling predominantly into Clojure commercial users isn’t a great market so consequently: no VC, small team, no sales/marketing/devrel - at a time when the startup boom was gaining momentum, developer infra was getting funded for the first time so competitors were spending tons of money on beautiful docs, marketing, full time twitter accounts, etc.

I still think there’s elements of an amazing product here, but the business window for a Clojure database has kinda closed - because Clojure itself has lost momentum. Datomic Cloud at its essence is a clojure hosting platform, the business is Clojure itself. I am very bullish on Clojure, I think it never found its killer app, and once found, once a money vector is opened, a bunch of cash (like, $100M†) will make all these problems go away and deliver on Clojure's mission to bring "simple made easy" to mass market application development, which is desperately needed. Maybe Hyperfiddle & Electric?

† Paraphrasing a Materialize press release, “it takes $100M to build a production ready database” -- and for the record, Materialize isn't doing too well, nobody seems to know what it is for and the VCs replaced the CEO earlier this year. Full quote: "Why did we raise $100M? Put quite simply, we believe this is the order of magnitude of investment that it takes to build a production-ready database. Databases are notoriously hard to get right, and we do not intend to cut any corners."

In the end, Cognitect chose to spend their lives doing something hard that matters, and I deeply respect that.