alt Hacker NewsAWS Acquires DuckLabs
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The title is misleading. AWS acquired DuckLabs, NOT DuckDB. The DuckDB source code is still owned by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation.
Quote from the article:
"As the CWI representative on the DuckDB Foundation... When DuckLabs spun out of CWI, we created this foundation, which holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so." - Peter Boncz
Congrats to the founders but honestly feel bad for the team. Hearing so many not good things coming from inside AWS these days. Place sounds like a total mess. I hope they just let the team carry on and don’t contaminate with with all the other craziness going on.
What does the financial counterpart of such a deal look like if the IP (main asset) is not part of the deal?
Purely acqui-hiring?
Seems like a good time to recommend Apache Datafusion. It's designed to be a library, but works pretty well standalone as well. There's a CLI version, but also Python and Java bindings, as well as a Rust library, of course.
From my own experience I can say it integrates far better into your Rust app than DuckDB does.
Well over 100 monthly contributors, too.
Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.
This is a real shame. I love DuckDB, and we've adopted/extended it and ducklake very heavily at Krea for our research.
I know the projects will remain open, and ostensibly still contributed to in the same direction, but surely AWS thinks of this as another piece of a product suite to compete with Databricks.
Nontheless, I think the open embedded query engine approach DuckDB is spearheading is larger than one project, and I remain excited about the broader ecosystem (especially datafusion).
I was a real fan from the very beginning, but now DuckDB 2.0 "as a server" and 5. asynchronous I/O [1] looks aimed at something very different from what I thought first.
AWS is a great home for DuckLabs. They just want people to use more compute and storage, so they have a degree of technology-neutrality. This is the key to allowing DuckDB to continue to grow in whatever directions are natural, rather than being warped by some kind of walled garden data platform strategy.
Title is "DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source"
I'm an idiot, and a lot of Hacker News goes over my head, but I still read it. Would anyone mind answering this question?
Are databases not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different databases? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?
Any indication yet as to whether Quack, DuckLake, real-time materialized views dev will continue full-steam ahead? B/c myself and i know of many others very interested in seeing these efforts completed... :crossed-fingers:
What's the relationship between MotherDuck (https://motherduck.com) and DuckLabs?
Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?
1 month later: "Re-writing DuckDB in Rust with Claude Ultra". There is a curios phenomenon, big tech uses great open source projects as a guinea pig for experimenting agent-based development approaches, see Bun, AstroJS.
I made a prediction that motherduck will be acquired by GCP. But I could not imagine duckdb labs will be acquired by AWS. I do not think of AWS as a serious contender in the data space. So, we have now Pola.rs and motherduck in the market. Who will acquire them? I believe Microsoft has brought in a fair few industry talent to build their Azure Fabric product. Then you also have AI companies that are buying devtool/utility companies left and right.
AWS rarely acquired startups, though leveraging someone else's tech is a typical pattern. It did license ParAccel and sold it as Redshift. It also runs Athena, which is based on Trino (a Presto fork).
Now, with Snowflake and Databricks earning big bucks in the intelligence era, time to gain market share by having DuckLabs under its ownership?
Wow congratulations for the original authors, but I hope it doesn't impact the users. I can imagine that it is very useful for AWS because they don't exactly have something similar.
I use DuckDB extensively for local dev as well as a parquet viewer.
I wasn't expecting this, and I am pleasantly surprised. I think AWS has been a bad player in the data space and very much behind all the other warehouse providers for many years now. This could lead into interesting integrations of DuckDB on top of all the data that lives in S3 and provide a leaner, faster and a more modern alternative to Athena.
Back in 2018, I took Hannes’ database course as part of my CS degree, which was one of the better ones I took. Over the years, I’ve seen DuckDB celebrated here (and other places), and now this. Congrats to both him and the Ducklabs team.
What if AWS eventually steer away duckdb team's bandwidth towards their AWS products or influence their work, since they are technically AWS employees.
I've been super impressed by DuckDB ever since first trying it out about 3 three years ago. Congrats to the founders!
People using DuckDB, what's your use case? I use sqlite for a lot of my personal projects. What's a good use case for using DuckDB?
What is the go to alternative from DuckDB?
Current Google cache of this page states:
> "The DuckDB project is governed by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation . The Foundation and DuckLabs are not funded by external investors (e.g., venture capital)."
But "(Last updated: Aug 2026)" and I was not able to find this text anymore.
I wonder if they took vc money after all. I guess not, but still, it seem like to be difficult to live as an independent open source company. Getting a big co as a parent/sponsor is probably the next best thing.
Congrats to the DuckDB team.
I've been eyeballing DuckDB and LanceDB as part of AI agent memories. This gives me a vibe that AWS will use DuckDB somehow in their ai agents sometime in the near future after seeing the potential.
I am a big fan of the Duck team since before their v1.0 and I am happy for them personally for the big payoff, both in monetary terms but also in terms of scale and longer-term viability of their baby. I am also happy to see the arrangement will keep the core OSS. Let's see what the future holds now!
super curious what exactly does it mean to acquire an open source product.
Remember when big co used to just donate to open source projects to help them out instead of acquiring/dominating them?
I am happy for the team's success but I am sad and anxious for what may become of the DuckDB. It is my favorite tool. Like other comments mentioned, DuckDB is open source and MIT license so I hope it will survive and evolve further the way it did.
Yeah the foundation is doing the heavy lifting here. Amazon's track record with technically interesting projects after a reorg is not great.
How do you suppose AWS can monetize it?
Should probably read "AWS Acquires DuckLabs" - the services, support, and primary development arm around DuckDB
"We also worried that scaling DuckLabs into a much larger sales, support, and operations organization would pull our attention away from the technical work and open-source community that made DuckDB successful in the first place."
Given AWS's services arm seems like a good play for a team. Congrats!
Extend, embrace, quack.-
I'm hoping this means we get an rds + s3 implementation of ducklake from AWS: https://ducklake.select/
did not expect that
I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright
Great move for AWS, does it mean AWS wants to build competitor to clickhouse ?
AWS acquiring DuckLabs is massive. nice move.
one feature I can't wait from the DuckDb team are real-time materialized views.
I hope AWS doesn’t dilute the DuckDB brand by calling their managed DuckDB offering SageMaker<something>…
I am glad for them. Does anyone know the amount of the operation?
This will be the engine for redshift now. They’ll make it read write and it’ll be magic.
Shameless plug for DuckDB Harbor - DuckDB server over HTTP (UDS or TCP/IP). Includes a new harbor based DuckDB CLI called pilot:
Avoid antitrust scrutiny with this one weird trick.
Goodbye DuckDB and hello surprise enterprise DuckDB that has special features that you can't live without that only work with Enterprise DuckDB.
Prediction: this is start of an aquisition spree by AWS.
Man. DuckDB is one of my favorite tools in the past decade. It basically replaced pandas/Polars for me and I hope aws leaves it alone.
Otoh, I am glad those guys got paid.
Please edit the title it’s wrong
Can we stop consolidating everything under a handful of massive companies?
I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes.
Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.