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Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

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Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#271

Post by bdcravens »

golergka wrote: post #253
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #172

Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. G…

Isn't AWS much less prone to customer lock-in? May be I don't have experience with tweaking AWS under heavy high load, but 98% of code I write for backend that I host on Amazon isn't specific to AWS or it's services in any way.

You can architect an agnostic solution there, but AWS messaging is firmly aimed at lock-in.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#273

Post by [deleted] »

umvi wrote: post #268
philjohn wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if their latency and performance claims in this blog post fall foul of Oracle's "No publishing benchmark results against our competitors".

What? How could that be legal? You can't say "Comparisons with competitors are not allowed" under a free market... right?

[deleted]

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#274

Post by bdcravens »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #246
Ensorceled wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about Oracle the db product, it's about Oracle the company. Why did you think everyone was saying the "Oracle database is predatory", that makes no sense.

That is fair, when I enter an HN post I automatically think of HN as hosting technical discussions, not business, and that is why I decided to look at the technical side.

Looking at the front page now (and virtually any time), there's quite a few articles that are more of a business or a political bend than technical.

A quick search of "Oracle" from the homepage search (only in the last year, since your account isn't much older than that), shows most articles are non-technical in nature.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#275

Post by philjohn »

umvi wrote: post #268
philjohn wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if their latency and performance claims in this blog post fall foul of Oracle's "No publishing benchmark results against our competitors".

What? How could that be legal? You can't say "Comparisons with competitors are not allowed" under a free market... right?

If it's in the contract not a lot you can do ... https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#276

Post by hiram112 »

golergka wrote: post #253
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #172

Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. G…

Isn't AWS much less prone to customer lock-in? May be I don't have experience with tweaking AWS under heavy high load, but 98% of code I write for backend that I host on Amazon isn't specific to AWS or it's services in any way.

Not exactly. If you stick to EC2 or containers with general Linux for your servers, and RDS Postgres and Mysql for DBs, and similarly for other services, you supposedly would be able to move to another cloud without issue.

We thought we'd be okay.

But when AWS started getting too expensive and we began looking to migrate, we discovered that there was a lot of 'glue' in our stack using bits and pieces of AWS-specific services. A continuous integration was using S3 buckets and Lambda, a few clever devOps guys had found ways to create alarms with SNS and SQS.

So while 90% of it was just a matter of moving to general CentOS containers on another platform and spinning up new Postgres and MySql and Mongo instances, that 10% of AWS specific code still causes issues that had to be remedied.

If I were in charge of a large infrastructure on AWS, the first thing I'd do is absolutely lock down every service that wasn't explicitly whitelisted, and open them as needed. Not wait till half your operation depends on dozens of AWS services that, while make things easy initially, lock you in to their platform.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#277

Post by senderista »

Notice they don't say that AWS has completely migrated off Oracle. There was plenty of Oracle there 5 years ago, including at the core of some of the most popular services. (There was also a significant migration effort underway then as well, mostly to DynamoDB.)

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#278

Post by forinti »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #69

As someone who has never used or worked with Oracle DBs, can someone explain why migrating to another technology is so difficult? With all the database engines available, is there really not another one that can match Oracle without massive customizations?

When you have an Oracle database, you probably have a lot of PLSQL. That, in itself, is not so serious (PgPLSQL is quite similar).

But you'll probably have Forms, Reports, and Apex too. These are all designed to make building an app a piece of cake but make it impossible to migrate except if you rewrite the whole thing.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#279

Post by dabit3 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #250
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.

Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money. Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this. After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backst…

100% not true in my experience, but can't speak for any org other than the one I work in (which has been by far the best job, team, and management I've ever worked with).

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#280

Post by senderista »

gopalv wrote: post #200
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #172

Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. G…

> Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of view. Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer. Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear a…

Great for the customer? Not so much these days. I would happily trade my 2-day shipping for a no-counterfeit/safety guarantee.
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