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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Cloud is a bad product and I wouldn't recommend. I'm guessing Oracle practically gifted OpenAI compute to make this possible and that this announcement is the whole purpose (i.e. "look at us, we're equal to AWS/Azure!!! OpenAI runs here!!!").

Oracle and Google Cloud have been doing this stuff constantly.

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Given that Microsoft and Google are already giving away huge amounts of compute to AI companies, Oracle must be outright paying them to do this.

Well, Microsoft is also using Oracle cloud. I mean, somebody has to use Oracle cloud after all lol

I've run large GPU clusters on OCI, quite happily. The hardware and interconnects are very good - NVIDIA has a good relationship with them because they are one of the clouds not making their own silicon. GPU clusters are Oracle's path to breaking into top tier of the clouds and IMO they do it well.

It's the high-level services where OCI is worth avoiding. Even core tech like object storage has been a problem.

Open Container Initiative?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

> "look at us, we're equal to AWS/Azure!!! OpenAI runs here!!!"

Possible, as they have lost deals even in countries where they enjoy MFN: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/oracle-ceo-confus... / https://archive.is/zO35B

TIL MFN: Most-Favored-Nation

Wikipedia:

> In international economic relations and international politics, most favoured nation is a status or level of treatment accorded by one state to another in international trade.

I've found Oracle's free tier quite generous. I guess OpenAI does as well.

It's sort of like a crack dealer's free tier. You know it's going to end miserably but you just can't help yourself.

Not necessarily, use it for testing only (not production) and you will be fine.

I run a little kube cluster on it that serves as the brain for my home lab on it and it’s been cranking along just fine for the better part of half a year. It’s all IaC and ephemeral so if it died tomorrow I could just restart it. Quite generous for $0

Can you feasibly run a homelab C&C server on the free tier of any of the big 3?

It’s possible to run a single node cluster on GCP for almost free, especially if you’re creative with spot instance. But afaik, not really otherwise. OCI is far and away more generous, giving you 4 dedicated always on nodes, which is just enough to run a decent mini cluster

I know you're talking about the cloud offerings, but the idea of using just a little bit of crack as "not production" is hilarious to me.

> a crack dealer's free tier

Pretty sure GCP & AWS employ a lot of ex-Oracle people.

I also have a couple of ARM servers there, nothing fancy. The internal networks and machine are extremely snappy for what they provide. Even the containers I threw in run great.

If you need small needs, it's a good provider. The dashboard is very convoluted, though.

Mines been running fine for years now

How much crack do you do a day?

Where do live that people are giving away crack?

Yeah, I use their free tier. At $0 it's the best offering. But I end up with racknerd for just raw Linux machine that I manage myself with `iptables` and friends.

I'm guessing the free tier available to OAI is not the same free tier available to anyone else.

I’ve heard of people being cut off without warning on the free tier.

Yes. Not only are there bad actors, but oracle aggressively culls underutilized instances. If you sign up and attach your billing info you won’t get that happening to you. I know, it sounds silly, but once I did that I had no issues. It’s difficult to even get instances provisioned if you don’t do that, it’s really only possible by having a script that runs and continually retries/requests instances. I’ve had my billing info tied to it and never had an issue with being charged or having instances deprovisioned the entire half year I’ve been using it.

They've been out of instances for years on free tier now. E.g. there is no free Ampere available anymore effectively.

I used their free tier. Didn’t meet my needs. Tried to delete my account. It fails to delete my tenent, can’t talk to support because it is free tier. Email support refused to help. Told me to pay to talk to support. So they want me to pay so I can have them delete my account.

They just happen to have many GPUs and a SLA, the rest doesn't matter.

We run https://pico.sh on their free tier, can’t complain about our experience.

Have you actually used it?

What's bad about their cloud product? Also, GCP is way better than azure, so it's not a question of equality.

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