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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

So I have to ask, is there actually a member of this community that uses Oracle Cloud? To be completely honest I'm surprised

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From what I've seen, Oracle Cloud usage is mostly to lift-and-shift legacy Oracle software packages off-prem and things that need low-latency access to them.

It's more Oracle software as SaaS, some basic IaaS (more like a hosting provider than a cloud) and hosted Oracle databases (which are just Oracle running Exadata for you).

So it's big companies struggling to get off old Oracle (and acquisitions like PeopleSoft) stuff and it's gross.

I don't know of anyone using it as "their cloud", but more of another thing to mix in with AWS/Azure/GCP to get rid of on-prem or colo facilities. It's more like IBM Cloud: A way to hang on to customers, sell services (human services like consulting and support), and keep milking those old products for big companies.

I should mention that you can't run Oracle RAC on any "real" public cloud, because it doesn't play nice with SDNs and needs shared block storage. People have done it with hacks (like VPN tunnels between hosts), but it's not performant and well, an unmaintainable hack. I've seen things like read-only single instance replicas of on-prem DBs, but uhhh.

A stand-alone Oracle server isn't a reliable solution because patching = outage. So Oracle providing managed Exadata is a win for some (again, usually big) businesses.

Oracle got a lot of companies hooked on proprietary DB features and rewriting can be painful or require spinning up a dev team for something in "maintenance mode". Even Amazon just fully got off Oracle a couple years go IIRC.

Just as a counterpoint, regarding your IBM Cloud snub, my small company has been doing our cloud needs with IBM for the past 5ish years, with great pricing, stability and support. The portfolio of non-ibm-specific services is huge.

And much of IBM cloud was popular with smaller companies when it was SoftLayer, before IBM acquired it.

I know one successful PaaS which has stayed, which to me says a lot about the quality of IBM Cloud

We do. Our stack is a fairly standard Java app on an oracle dB. Seems to work well enough. We couldn't get the app to work with azure and aws is a no go (we have retail clients)

Were you affected? Wondering if your DNS is setup separately then you wouldn't be affected by whatever mishap that happened to Oracle's own DNS.

We were not, oddly enough. I can't speak in too much detail since I'm not on that team but our region was included so we may just have been lucky

Sorry I'm out of the loop: why does "we have retail clients" mean "aws is a no go".

Retailers like wal mart supposedly demand their partners and suppliers to not use AWS.

and to clarify on the above reply, it's widely suspected that Amazon snoop at data hosted on AWS, so they can make/sell competing products that are selling well based on what they learn from snooping.

So basically any business that makes or sells anything that Amazon may possibly make or sell in the future doesn't want to touch AWS.

Pretty much this: https://twitter.com/Shopify/status/1367929509354299392

That cannot possibly be true.

Do you imagine the fallout if it came out ( and how would in not, thousands of people would have passed through, one disgruntled employee is enough) ? AWS would lose most customers within a few years, Amazon.com as well ( disgusted buyers and sellers), there'd be lawsuit everywhere. I really don't think anyone in Amazon is stupid enough to risk a trillion dollar business for some potential competitive advantage on whatever sold on Amazon.com

Amazon has regularly launched products with their "Amazon Basics" brand, copying well-selling 3rd-party products sold on Amazon.com, always a few bucks cheaper. [1]

What makes you think it would be different with AWS?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

Are you really comparing making knockoff products with stealing their consumers data?

I doubt that actually looking into EC2 instances (which AWS would never do, "pinkie promise") would even be necessary. Metadata about the company's deployed infrastructure would totally suffice to derive enough business insights to launch a "knockoff product", as you call it.

The fallout is already in effect, if you read the above comments.

Can confirm, did large projects at huge retailer, AWS was cursed, anything but AWS, spoken by execs through clenched teeth.

Can also confirm, a percentage of our customers see Amazon as a fighting word. They conflate the store with AWS. The store is their competitor.

Ah I get it, because of a different part of Amazon being a competitor. Interesting!

can you tell me what issue you were facing with Azure?

I haven't investigated in more detail but Oracle Cloud supposedly has lower bandwidth costs than AWS and Azure, making it cheaper in the long run for transfer heavy services. That's why Zoom uses it.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle-clo...

I'm using it for over one year now as my backup remote programming platfrom and CI server for small projects (Jenkins), and on other server as mysql + minecraft server machine.

Working flawlessly with ssh, out of the box. It is FAR simpler to manage than AWS in my opinion.

There is "no catch".

I do. 2 Free vms! The one is a gitlab worker when I reach my free gitlab minutes. The other hosts demo websites/ projects

Same, but VPS server and Grafana+InfluxDB.

Do the servers have static IP addresses?

Anyone who uses DynDNS is using Oracle Cloud.

when dyn got acquired, I stayed on for a while because I liked dyn. but after a bit, oracle cloud changed the terms and I didn't really like interacting with their systems or giving them any revenue so I switched to amazon, which has worked quite well for me.

And DynDNS was definitely down.

Yup!

Order of magnitude cheaper and way more predictable costs than other cloud providers.

Sometimes you have to do things you aren't proud of. $20 is $20.

Oracle Apps are on cloud which means at the minimum most clients who use Oracle Apps use Oracle Cloud.

Companies also use Oracle Cloud PaaS to build custom enterprise applications

I do running GraalVM, Node.JS projects on OCI and Digital Assistant for chatbot

I am.

My condolences. Genuinely curious, how has it been?

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