Hacker News Reader

Comment by habibur | Hacker News Reader

My first question was licensing cost. Here's the rate :

$18 per processor per month to use GraalVM Enterprise.

The trouble you'll run into with Oracle licensing is that, in many cases, when they say "core" they mean cores for the underlying hardware. If you are running this on a virtual machine, Oracle will traditionally want you to license every core on the box underneath, even if you're only carving out 2 or 4 or whatever for the VM itself.

Worse, if your VM platform supports migration (vMotion et al), they will then insist that you buy licenses for every core the workload could theoretically run on. For modern hypervisors, this often times means licensing every core in your virtualization estate. I've had Oracle licensing tell me this exact thing with a straight face.

There are more than one law firms in the US which do nothing but sue Oracle on their client's behalf. When your licensing terms are so odious that multiple law firms can make a living fighting your terms.... something isn't right.

"One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison"

It's super confusing. There are several ways to get it. I think it's free if you run stuff in the Oracle Cloud. And the pricing on Oracle Cloud is actually quite good.

But the price list is here, it seems:

https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java...

So price can vary between $25/processor/month and $12.50/month with further discounts available if you negotiate, probably. But ... this has to be rounded up to whatever the physical processor has, then multiplied by some "core factor" which can actually reduce the number of cores you need to buy from the physical number. Which can be found here:

https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core...

For Intel and AMD chips, the factor is 0.5 - so the actual prices are just half of those numbers!

The rules about virtualization are kinda weird especially because Oracle Cloud presumably is virtualized itself. Presumably it's because if your jobs can "flex" at will then it becomes impossible to say how many cores you're actually using. Like, what do you do, integrate the area under the curve of second-by-second CPU usage or something? That would be very complicated. If they say, OK, your workload can use up to 100 cores then you pay for 100 cores, it's very simple. All you have to agree on with them is how many cores the maximum amount is. I can't imagine it would matter if the physical underlying hardware changes as long as the workload can only run on one machine at once. Otherwise it'd be impossible to run any Oracle product in any cloud at all, but people do it!

Above is old info. It’s no longer billed that way.

See https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf

—-

> “ Amazon EC2 and RDS - count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is enabled, and one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled. Microsoft Azure – count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper- threading is enabled, and one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper- threading is not enabled. When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.”

The key is that last sentence.

It doesn't matter - Oracle is a company that will send lawyers and salesmen your way to threaten and try to squeeze the money out of you.

We've had the case where they threathened to double per-core licensing cost of their products just because our developers wanted to use PostgreSQL in their new project. Once they get into your system they'll bleed your time and money with their licensing bullshit. You have better things to do with your company time.

The key is "Authorized Cloud Environments", which is defined in the first paragraph:

> This policy applies to cloud computing environments from the following vendors: Amazon Web Services –Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform (collectively, the ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’).This policy applies to these Oracle programs.

So, only for AWS and Azure.

The document is about cloud licensing. You're replying to a comment about vmotion which most likely means on-premise setup.

Speaking from experience listening to corporate sales deals, those listed prices are just like at the street bazaar.

You only get them when lacking negotiation skills, or failing to understand the whole political process from enterprise sales.

I wouldn't be surprised if FB only started paying 2+ years after starting the contract.

As a lighthouse client, FB is pretty amazing in this space.

Yeah something like that would be quite possible.

I replace Rich with Raging - but both work.

But that's what they do. Oracle is a law firm that happens to employ a few programmers.

It’s strange that all those lawyers can create top-notch CS research though..

If your "enterprise" software doesn't generate $18/month, then you probably don't have a viable business model and should use the community edition. I don't take the Oracle hate seriously when it's all the latest fashion to pay much, much more for your CPU because it's hosted by Amazon. The alternative of "free" services in the Google-sense (ie data-mining users to sell to third parties or develop other products) seems worse, personally.

Did you even read the parent comment? It's not $18/mo; it's $18/mo/theoretically-schedulable-substrate-CPU. For people considering running this on an IaaS, that'd literally be "$18 * [number of CPUs in the entire datacenter emcompassing your AWS/GCP/Azure zone] per month". That's a higher OpEx than pretty much any single service is worth.

Yes, and that's trivial for useful business cases. Let's look at a service beyond reproach:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/

Wow! An M5 costs $2300 a month, which is almost three times as much as Graal licensing would cost, assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864). Frankly, if a minimum wage job is a larger revenue stream than your "app", then you should probably do the minimum wage job instead. There's also a community edition. It's free. I think the moral outrage about anything Oracle-related is a hollow fashion statement, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.

> assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864)

...no, you're still reading it wrong. It's not the number of substrate CPUs on the compute node your workload is running on. It's the number of substrate CPUs on all the compute nodes your workload could potentially ever be re-scheduled or migrated onto. I.e., all the CPUs of every single (non-reserved) compute node in the datacenter. (Or, presuming certain service-transitioning technologies, multiple datacenters!) We're talking about e.g. "the entirety of AWS EC2 us-west-2." Hundreds of thousands of machines. Millions of CPUs.

By analogy: imagine there's a car-sharing service, that rents out its fleet of cars to people — but because, when you rent a car, you could theoretically end up driving any car in the rental company's fleet — they set their premium to be $18/mo * [the size of the rental company's entire rental-car fleet.] Because in theory, if you set things up just right, you could manage to drive all their cars, in one day. And so they want to charge you, at all times, for that basically-impossible worst-case upper-bound price.

Do you see how insane that sounds?

That sounds insane because you made it up. You don’t get a bill for every core that Amazon owns because you hosted an enterprise edition of GraalVM on one. Even if that were the case, use the CE or collocate or self host.

You don't, because there is a special case for AWS and Azure, this is mentioned earlier in this thread.

If you set up your own virtualisation environment, then you're subject to those rules. However, you can work around it by separating out the machines that runs Oracle into its own groups of physical machines.

It does mean that deployment of Oracle software is much more complicated, since you can't use the regular environment. You also need it to be as separate as possible unless you want to have a long discussion with Oracle's lawyers about how to interpret those clauses.

> Even if that were the case, use the CE or collocate or self host.

Or, as the op suggested, their pricing is just straight up insane

That’s basically libel at this point. How about actually adding some facts to your bullshit here and there?

I’m just going off what the GGGP commentor (who is not me, please note) stated as the facts of the situation.

If you want to rebut those facts, go ahead, but don’t axiomatically accept the facts (by not arguing with the GGGP commentor directly, now that you understand the point that they were making) and then try to deny their implications.

Or maybe they are just historically a terrible company to work with who makes mostly shitty software and everyone knows it.

There's no moral outrage over here either, just "I dont want to do business with assholes who keep fucking everyone over."

> “Processor: shall be defined as all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running. Programs licensed on a processor basis may be accessed by your internal users (including agents and contractors) and by your third party users. The number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table which can be accessed at http://oracle.com/contracts. All cores on all multicore chips for each licensed program are to be aggregated before multiplying by the appropriate core processor licensing factor and all fractions of a number are to be rounded up to the next whole number.”

x86 has a 0.5 core multiplier. So if you have a 16-core server, you need to purchase “8 processors”.

And before people start spewing Oracle hate, this is standard enterprise on-premise licensing practices used by Microsoft, IBM, SAP etc.

https://www.oracle.com/ae/a/ocom/docs/graalvm-price-list.pdf

https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core...

> And before people start spewing Oracle hate, this is standard enterprise on-premise licensing practices used by Microsoft, IBM, SAP etc.

I don't see why we can't be annoyed at all the large enterprises with their "negotiate your own per-core price and commitment" sales.

OpenJDK > 11 has GraalVM inside, you can activate it with a switch.

https://openjdk.java.net/projects/graal/

This is partially incorrect. JEP 410 [0] will be removing them from HotSpot in the next release (17). Project Metropolis has also been put on hold, so for the foreseeable future if you want Graal features, you'll have to use GraalVM [1]

[0] https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/410 [1] https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/metropolis-dev/2021-...

That is incorrect. JVMCI is still in OpenJDK and is the only thing required to run Graal. You need to put Graal as jar from Maven on the upgrade-module-path since JEP 410 since it's no longer there by default but this is the only thing that changed.

So you can continue to use Graal as your last tier compiler or to compile Truffle languages on OpenJDK.

I see! I must have misinterpreted the mailing list.

> so for the foreseeable future if you want Graal features, you'll have to use GraalVM

This isn't true - you can use Graal from a JAR just fine.

There is no chance Facebook is paying anywhere close to the published price.

How does this work with dynamic cloud workloads. If I can effectively tack this on to my AWS cost with the same granularity then I could use it only where I come out ahead. But if the whole monthly core licensing thing means that I effectively have to make an all or nothing decision on my entire cloud fleet on a month by month basis that’s far less likely to be worth it.

$216/year pr CPU not pr core? That's... Incredibly cheap? Less than $2/core/year on the right CPUs?

Ed: ah, no. See sibling comment

Per socket or per core? Whats the business case where this makes sense, it seems a pretty steep price?

Since there’s a free version either the extra performance of the paid version pays for itself or it doesn’t.

Probably cases where hw is expensive or where your workload doesn't scale horizontally all that well, or where latency is a big deal (better perf = lower latency = less hw needed).

In true Oracle style, they will bleed you dry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com