Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#161

Post by vidarh » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:31 AM UTC

vgt wrote: post #158

dexterdog wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean why is nobody doing that? Lots of providers are doing that. And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents. > AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculou…

> And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents. I don't think that's an accurate statement. Google Cloud and Azure have broad offerings, and in many cases eclipse AWS (ex: Big Data, ML, pricing, BI, NoSQL, Hadoop/Spark, containers, and even things like load balancers and persistent storage).

I think he meant services other than the big one. In that case he's right. But the point is most people aren't using those services - they use AWS as a glorified dumb dedicated hosting provider. And that's exactly the wrong way to use it.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#162

Post by vidarh » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:33 AM UTC

merb wrote: post #149

vidarh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons. I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhe…

Really you probably never hired people.

I have hired dozens of engineers over the last 20+ years I've done this, so maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions to you have no basis for.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#163

Post by socmag » Thu, Sep 22, 2016, 2:52 PM UTC

jodoglevy wrote: post #156

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I needed an intro to this guy of yours? (simone dot brunozzi @ gmail)

I recently joined this team from Azure. Lots of senior AWS and Joyent folks here as well. Send me a mail at joe dot levy at oracle dot com and I can connect you with the right folks. Same goes for anyone else interested!

I have a little bit of insight into what you guys are up to from a good friend of mine who was there from almost day zero.

I also know enough about the project to know it is a serious and daring effort and there is every reason to be proud of it.

The development cluster alone is something very special to be part of.

Hope you are enjoying it

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#164

Post by Annatar » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:26 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #43

halestock wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'm defending Oracle, but what did they do with Solaris to make you think they aren't trustworthy with user data? It sounds like you're conflating two criticisms and equating "generally shitty company" with "untrustworthy company". Oracle DBs are pretty ubiquitous and I don't think I've heard privacy complaints leveled at them. Hell, even Amazon uses Oracle DBs pretty extensively internally.

Here's the thing: If that's the sort of business we're dealing with, which will sell out anything for an opportunistic buck, and you're now paying them monthly for data/compute, do you think they won't take advantage of that?

Oracle corporation actually made an industry out of making sure customers' data is protected. That's one of the reasons why Oracle database sells, and why it pretty much killed or ate all other competition in the relational database management system space. Just take a look at the encryption features and PKI / SmartCard support in the database, and I think we're done here.

Oracle might be stupid, but they're not dumb.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#165

Post by Annatar » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #64

halestock wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle may be evil, but they aren't dumb. A lot of their revenue comes from businesses which have much stricter requirements around data privacy than individuals.

They won't sell off your data, but they'll screw you over as much as they can: Can you spell "vendor lock-in", or "overpriced"?

That depends: if you feel paying $47,000 per license for an Oracle database is overpriced, considering it's pretty much the only database which actually works and can withstand the kind of abuse large customers dish out at it, then I guess it's overpriced. I happen to think it's a bargain and a half, and wouldn't mind paying for it in the least. I know exactly what I'd be getting, and what that baby can do. And for $47,000, it can do so much in one package that other databases better hide. The only other database which can measure up against Oracle is Vertica, which is surprise! surprise! another commercial product (at $150,000, Vertica is much more expensive, but it's also awesome). PostgreSQL comes in a distant third, and for the users of the enormous and completely exotic, there's Teradata. And with the exception of PostgreSQL, which still has long way to go with respect to synchronous multimaster replication, all these other databases cost so much that it's enough to make one's head spin. So Oracle is actually the cheapest.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#166

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 27, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #100

rbanffy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really hard to prevent me from doing a database dump, tar-bz2-ing it and scp-ing it someplace else. It would need to be something outrageously brain-damaged to fail that low level of functionality.

They can't eliminate it, but they can make it as hard as possible: encourage you to use Oracle DBs, etc.

[deleted]