More Oracle Layoffs Started Nov. 1, Cloud Unit Impacted | Hacker News Reader

More Oracle Layoffs Started Nov. 1, Cloud Unit Impacted

channelfutures.com

113 pointsDenisM48 comments

Oracle is really weird.

Their cloud offerings at hobbyist level is vastly superior to any of the big clouds. Just objectively better.

Yet they keep nuking hobbyist accounts with little rhyme or reason as to who gets hit. So nobody builds anything remotely serious on it.

Congrats Oracle, you've managed to get the worst of both world: Incur the cost of free tier while ensuring future high value customers don't trust it.

A lot of people confuse the free trial account that lets you use free tier resources with a pay-as-you-go account that only uses free tier resources. The former WILL eventually be terminated without notice, the latter usually does not unless you are doing something they see as suspicious.

At any rate, I've had mine since the start of Covid Times and never had problems provisioning an instance.

This is anecdotal but virtually everyone I see getting excited about the free tier on Oracle is hoping to max out their usage in an exploitative way, though they likely don’t see it that way.

I think in these situations you have to imagine what would be sustainable if every user did the same. If you exceed that, you’re probably going to meet some friction.

The thing is Oracle is closing accounts that don't use resources.

Could this be because they’re allocating resources in a wasteful manner that they could allocate to potential customers?

Covid Times - Sounds like a great name for an early 2020's typeface.

it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

I had a pay-go account (with valid CC and OTP) for 4 years with an idle empty server and the whole account was terminated without recourse.

> the latter usually does not unless you are doing something they see as suspicious.

I used it as a gitlab server, it was regularly updated, there were no other services running. It wasn't even used intensively, maybe 2-3 pushes a day. And yet, one day they just closed everything.

No suprise as everybody was warning me they would do it but still it felt very weird.

Oracle and hobbyist are two words combined that can't make sense

An Oracle hobbyist is someone who endures pain for pleasure.

Like a Rust programmer.

I thought that was Java programmers.

Hence the well-known saying:

An Oracle hobbyist is a (sad-o-)masochist ;)

Computer banks to rule the world.

Not superior, just more generous. And if they don't see you as a large corporate customer in line to sign a contract then they have no use for you on their platform.

My experience is the opposite. Have used their forever free tier for 3 years now with no issue, no downtime, no drama.

I worked at a F500 company that used Oracle Cloud. Really impressive how their account executives were able to convince our IT department to go all in on OCI just because we used the Oracle database.

I once worked at a company, that bought a lot of unnecessary software, because they knew they need a database, but didn't knew what a database actually is.

Did they buy a mauve colored database? I hear mauve has the most RAM.

Edit: it's a Dilbert reference. PHB thinks he needs a SQL DB and Dilbert asks what color he wants.

I recently helped a company migrate off a SQL-92 DBISAM database they used to serve customers like Google and Microsoft for over 20 years…

They set it up so you can't afford to run it on any other cloud

Data gravity is helluva force

I mean if the joke that Google is just an Ads company with a software engineering org is true, then Oracle is just a Sales company with a software engineering org.

Oracle Cloud? It is all mostly exadata as a service and that expensive as hell. All other component services suck. The growth is coming because the Oracle database lynchpin and restrictive licensing policies. If you analyse the revenue, I think 3-5 customers make bulk of the revenue (Microsoft/OpenAI, X.ai being two of them). NVidia based revenue is not really a sustainable or real revenue stream.

So uh do we still get to keep our Free A1 VPS with 4 OCPU, 24GB RAM and 200GB Storage...??

If Oracle starts charging the dozens (tens of thousands?) of us that signed up for Pay-as-you-go just to be able to provision a VM, I'm deleting my account.

But in all seriousness, Oracle is a terrible company that has scammed governments and corporations. Not really surprised. Bryan Cantrill said it best [0]. Oracle is "morally bankrupt," Larry Ellison prioritizes profits over ethics and innovation. I'm not surprised if the stock price was forced to fall by Ellison because of his July sells [1]

1. He dumped $322 million (2.25 million shares) in mid July in TWO days signalling lack of confidence

2. These shares were spread out with different sizes, to probably minimize the market impact

3. The sells still pushed the stock prices down

4. Then the "cost-cutting" and OCI layoffs happen

Obviously correlation isn't causation, but Oracle clearly doesn't care about their cloud, just MONEY, HA!

    Larry Ellison's Stock Sales - July 15-16, 2024
    Date          Quantity        Price          % Change       Running Total
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Jul 16        87,127         $143.17        -0.01%         1,145,732,353
    Jul 16        1,037,873      $142.53        -0.09%         1,145,819,480
    Jul 15        579,765        $142.64        -0.05%         1,146,277,588
    Jul 15        81,871         $143.45        -0.01%         1,146,195,717
    Jul 15        237,491        $144.61        -0.02%         1,145,958,226
    Jul 15        191,252        $145.34        -0.02%         1,145,766,974
    Jul 15        34,621         $146.30        -0.00%         1,145,732,353

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s

[1] https://www.quiverquant.com/stock/ORCL/insiders/

I’ve been enjoying doing what I call “siphoning pennies from Larry Ellison” happily via the “always free” OCI tier for almost a year now. I know, given the stewards of this, that “always free” is an empty promise that will eventually go away, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

I used https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle to provision resources and it’s been the “brain” for my personal cloud for this whole time. It doesn’t run much, basically ArgoCD, Tailscale operator and a CoreDNS deployment that does internal routing, but heck, it’s a free highly available control plane for an internal homelab. No other cloud even comes close to OCI’s offering, if you were to provision the same on other clouds it would be minimum $50 USD+ per month

Once it finally dies I’ll probably just go find some low cost provider like Hetzner or OVH to run this. I’m purposefully not really doing much on that instance as a result because I know that my small little bundle of terraform that builds out the vm’s will eventually need to be rewritten, so I’ve also purposefully avoided using any OCI specific constructs for my implementation.

Did you link a card with Pay-as-you-go? It seems like OCI puts free tier users in a low-priority queue, so that people have resorted to using auto-clicker scripts for weeks to even provision an instance.

That repo looks cool, if I really wanted to learn Kubernetes. My usage right now is for running inference on CPU RAMs because I refuse to upgrade my 980-ti, so I'm not sure it would work for me

You have to link a card if you don’t want to have a bot that spams looking for open instances. I tried without linking a card but it’s basically impossible without automation to secure an instance, and they can arbitrarily just nuke your instance at any time if they feel like you are being “abusive” or even just idling the machines and not using resources, plenty of complaints about that. Adding a card removes all of those concerns and you can instantly provision the resources and never worry about anything being arbitrarily shut down.

I have only had one 1 cent charge since I got it because I provisioned some volume storage before I realized that it would incur costs.

If you just use the repo I linked and otherwise never touch resources or auto provision anything on the infra side you’ll never be charged.

I would highly recommend this use case for learning kube, but also it’s kind of limiting because several things you might want to use with kube will also incur additional costs. You can avoid the costs if you simply just don’t do anything that triggers a cost event, but people who are not familiar with how kube can provision infra resources under the hood might footgun themselves and wire into a cloud load balancer instead of using MetalLB for instance.

Probably inference is not really a good use case here, the compute they give is considered extremely good in terms of free, but still kind of anemic for inference use cases.

Yeah I refuse to give Oracle a dime, so I'll keep that in mind.

I only run the tiny models for fun (the CPU inference is enough) and any complex coding tasks go through GPT or Claude. Mainly just using the one instance as another backup server, run scrapers, host a bunch of containers, and experiment with networking services. I don't see a reason to split up my one instance, but maybe in the future.

Yeah the main reason that I’m interested in using OCI is because it’s free and it actively takes money away from them by me doing this. So I will happily continue to take advantage of Larry, I know he would do the exact same to me but many times worse. So it’s a great solution as long as it lasts. I get to make Larry inconsequentially poorer every second my stuff runs, plus I get some free cloud compute. Win win

Making Larry lose money while you sleep, truly a reverse Uno :)

This is the first thing I’ve ever read that has me considering spinning up an OCI setup.

It’s a use case half driven by value and half driven by spite, and 100% about selfishly taking things at the detriment of others - which just feels so perfectly on brand for everything having to do with Larry Ellison. A microdose of his own medicine, if you will

What model are you running? I found it to be too slow.

SmolLM v2 1.7GB Q8 has been running pretty fast. Only needs about 3.5GB of memory. I think it's fine for chatting, but it's only really good for Python code compared to larger models.

Deepseek-coder is pretty slow, even with the quantized models.

https://huggingface.co/blog/smollm

>Yeah I refuse to give Oracle a dime

The parent only paid $0.01. Even $0.10 should be fine, even if you strongly dislike Oracle: the cost to Oracle for charging your card $0.10 is more than that, so they're actually losing money by charging you such a small amount!

Interesting. Tell me more. The stock looks wild. Time to go short?

Oracle is an interesting company.

Lots of locked-in enterprises, but everybody in tech hates them.

I think they're a future IBM, but it'll take a long time, perhaps decades, to get there (once an ERP, database system, or cloud provider gets into a big enterprise, it's not leaving again soon).

They have rock solid earnings [https://valustox.com/ORCL] but they're trading at high valuations given their low growth rate and modest dividend.

I am neither buying nor shorting them right now.

I think the only tech people who hate them are the ones who think that Oracle is a database company ala Postgres and then wonder why it is worth billions of dollars. Most of their current revenue for now comes from their fusion ERP suite that runs in the cloud. Those products have a lot of stickiness as businesses don’t switch ERP systems often.

Never short based on fundamentals. It takes a lot of tuition fees (losses in the market) to learn that lesson.

I think you're misinformed on how Larry handles his investments.

He uses a Blind Trust.

Due to how many investments he has that could create SEC insider trading issues, Larry has a Blind Trust that sells his stock as they see best fit without his influence.

So this wasn't Larry selling $322M in stock. It was his Blind Trust that did.

Also, he's not hurting for cash. He gets an annual dividend of ~$1.6B from Oracle due to him owning 42% of he company.

Blind trusts are hardly a guarantee.

Trump put his kids in charge of the trust. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-children-busine...

Romney had a friend handle it. https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mitt-romneys-blind-trust-blin...

Also, there's an important difference in threat-model between:

1. Insulating a blind trust from an insider's reactive knowledge of changes. ("A secret CIA report says Latveria is going to open its borders to trade.")

2. Insulating a blind trust from an insider's proactive policy decisions which causes changes. ("I've always told my friends that we should try to trade with Latveria.")

In other words, it's not really a "blind" trust if it makes investment decisions knowing that the politician will cause certain sectors or businesses to perform better or worse.

Actually I think you're mischaracterizing and spreading misinformation about how Larry's stock sales work. Let's look at the ACTUAL SEC Filings on their website [0]. These filings show this is the "LAWRENCE J. ELLISON REVOCABLE TRUST", but being revocable doesn't automatically mean it's not a blind trust. However, several details from the filings indicate this was NOT operating as a blind trust:

1. These were planned exercises of stock options that were expiring on July 24, 2024 [1]

2. Two transactions of 1,125,000 options each were exercised at $40.47 [1]

3. The shares were then sold in declining price blocks to minimize market impact

4. All forms are signed by either Paul T. Marinelli (trustee) [2][3] or Aimee Weast (Attorney in fact for Ellison) [1]

5. Ellison is explicitly listed as "Officer" and "10% Owner" [1]

Go to page 4 to see these documents: [0] https://investor.oracle.com/sec-filings/default.aspx

July 17, 2024 - Form4 - Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership

[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001341439/1c6945f...

July 16, 2024 - Form144 - Report of proposed sale of securities

[2] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001341439/3bc4831...

July 15, 2024 - Form144 - Report of proposed sale of securities

[3] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001341439/0b76c30...

While you're correct that Ellison isn't hurting for cash, the evidence suggests these were scheduled options exercises ahead of expiration, not discretionary blind trust trading.

I'd encourage you to review the actual SEC filings before making claims about how Larry handles his investments...

Officers of company's schedule the sale of their stock to signal in advance their sales to preempt insider trading concerns.

And as you found, it's managed by a trust.

So I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Are you suggesting someone should let their stock expire ($0) that's worth $322M?

It seems like you have an axe to grind and I don't understand why.

That's all I'll say on this topic.

The point isn't about whether he should let the options expire - of course he shouldn't. The point is about accuracy in discussing Oracle's corporate governance.

You specifically claimed "Larry has a Blind Trust that sells his stock as they see best fit without his influence." The SEC filings directly contradict this:

1. This is a Revocable Trust, and while technically a blind trust can be revocable, the filings show this trust is actively managed with Ellison's involvement:

- The transactions were specifically timed around options expiration

- The sales were carefully structured in declining price blocks

- The trust uses Ellison's authority as Officer/10% Owner

- Forms are signed by his Attorney

2. These weren't discretionary sales by trustees "as they see best fit" - they were planned options exercises with a clear purpose and strategy.

I don't have an axe to grind. I'm just correcting a mischaracterization about how Larry manages his Oracle holdings. Accuracy matters when discussing corporate governance and SEC filings, especially for a company as significant as Oracle.

If this were a true blind trust they would've exercised the options at $40.47, immediately sell at market (~$143), and net ~$100 profit per share. Instead they did price stepping, and used Larry's Officer status under the pretense of independence.

> revocable doesn't automatically mean it's not a blind trust

That is correct, but it also means that this trust is not tax-advantaged.

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