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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

#391

Post by rogerdb »

jpalomaki wrote: post #169
the_duke wrote: post #144

The video feels like a big middle finger to Oracle. "stop oracle", and the URL https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom . Not that I'm complaining, Oracle deserves all the hate they get for their business practices. But associating AWS with "breaking free" is extremely ironic. It's just as much of a source for vendor lock in as Oracle. If you are not extremely careful/dedicated with your system design, you a…

This is kind of reply to Larry Ellison's comments [1] about how Amazon can't run their business on their own databases. [1] https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50

Haha, that's a great link. I actually laughed out loud at how ridiculous his comment sounds.

I used to work on a team at Amazon that was _very_ relieved and happy to move away from Oracle and onto the AWS databases. I wasn't directly involved but I understand the migration work was monstrous. I think it's clear from Ellison's comment that Oracle considers that to be a product feature.

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

#392

Post by haltingproblem »

throwaway981211 wrote: post #291
gopalv wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT. Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It…

You (and other Amazon) employees keep saying orgs/organizations while talking about Amazon vs. Google vs. FB vs. .... I was confused and after reading for a bit I realized you mean divisions within Amazon.

That might appear to be a valid distinction, to an outsider it appears less material. Perhaps you can start by describing how the culture varies within Amazon.

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

#393

Post by AStellersSeaCow »

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…

I'm at Amazon now, my team is fairly shitty - let's say in the bottom third of engineering teams anyone at the company would want to work for - and the average tenure of people on the team is close to 5 years.

It's hard to get fired as a college hire. It happens, but only if you're pretty lazy or a fuckup or a mis-hire to begin with. I've seen vanishingly few cases where someone was managed out at a time that it denied them stock vests, and only once that it was even mentioned (then by an exceptionally petty manager).

To be perfectly clear: working at Amazon sucks for plenty of reasons, some of them covered in this thread. Compensation is not commensurate with the quality of engineer you have to be to work there, the company is disgustingly cheap in general, many teams are drowning in tech debt (the original post's cheerleading aside, half my org is still suffering from the slapdash way the Oracle migration was sped through to meet arbitrary internal deadlines), and the fraction of managers interested in building petty fiefdoms rather than interesting or good tech is increasing at an alarming rate. But anyone who thinks it's a huddled mass of sobbing husks with PTSD is overstating it.

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

#394

Post by earthshot »

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…

This comment doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you know how Amazon comp works. A standard SDE package is something like this:

year 1: $X cash + $Y cash bonus (vests daily) + $Z RSUs (vest at end of year), where approximately 95% of the comp is cash.

year 2: $x cash + $Y cash bonus (vests daily) + $Z RSUs (vest at end of year) where approximately 90% of the comp is cash. Likely a few percent more than year 1 in total comp.

years 3 and 4: $x cash + $Y RSUs (vests semi-annually for most) where the RSUs make up a meaningful part of the comp. Likely a few percent more than year 2 in total comp.

Given that comp structure, it is essentially impossible to do what AtlasBarfed has suggested, as people get paid quite quickly.

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

#395

Post by zapita »

whack wrote: post #282
gopalv wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-m…

Do you know many Amazon warehouse workers?

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

#396

Post by philliphaydon »

WorldMaker wrote: post #311
snuxoll wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MERGE statement is less functional and has a LOT of hidden gotchas, I won’t argue that I can be useful but I don’t disagree when them not providing the footgun.

I won't argue that debugging MERGE statements is easy, and that there aren't pitfalls, but it's a very declarative relational model reduce pattern so calling it "less functional" doesn't seem accurate to me, if you mean functional as in functional programming. (If you mean functional as in the raw number of features supported, I also heavily disagree because I know from past experience there are reductions you can do…

Merge in SQLServer is horrible imo. It’s horrifically slow. And causes more problems than it solves. After learning about upsert in PostgreSQL. Ah I wish we had it in sqlserver. The PostgreSQL code is so much cleaner and more efficient.

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

#397

Post by philliphaydon »

brightball wrote: post #334
Scramblejams wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? I'm kicking tires at the moment.

Better price than RDS, better speed, never worrying about the disk size and needing to plan to scale up, built in data redundancy and restart times of under a minute in the event of a crash (faster than replica failover so you don’t need a replica unless you just really want one). I miss it. Daily. Took the amount of time I spent on DB maintenance every month from about 5 hours to about 0 hours.

You don’t need to worry about disk size in RDS now. You can set an upper limit and it will grow as it needs. No need to resize now.

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

#398

Post by tsimionescu »

bluejekyll wrote: post #73
onefuncman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed the Amazon Corretto announcement— there’s an Amazon JDK now.

My guess is that like they did with Google, with time, Oracle will go after all the OpenJDK derivatives. To be clear the licensing appears to be open enough so that this shouldn’t be a real threat, but IANAL.

Google did not have an OpenJDK alternative, they had a implementation of a language and stdlib that was 99% identical to Java.

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

#399

Post by kbenson »

scarface74 wrote: post #384
kbenson wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee's experience, and public perception. Not to get into whether Amazon employees have it good or bad, but using the software engineers to explain the median Amazon employee's experience seems a bit odd. Given that Amazon is widely reported to have well over half a million employees now, and I doubt the software engineers are anywhere near the maj…

In that case, should we not count how badly Foxconn workers who manufacturer Apple’s phones have it? While technically they aren’t Apple employees, that’s a distinction without a moral difference. Would the same people who are criticizing how Amazon treats “its” employees change, if Amazon contracted out all of its warehouse workers? Somewhere in every tech company’s supply chain there are some blue collar workers th…

> In that case, should we not count how badly Foxconn workers who manufacturer Apple’s phones have it?

First, we do. There's been plenty of stories and Apple has gotten a lot of flak about Foxconn. Rightly so.

Second, I really have no idea why you're bringing outsourced companies into this. Amazon is actually employing massive amounts of people. According to a recent NYT article[1], "Amazon had 653,300 employees around the world at the end of June, not including temporary workers and contractors." What's the point of trying to inflate the number when Amazon is already one of the largest employers in the world?

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

#400

Post by epiphanitus »

hiram112 wrote: post #276
golergka wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Impractical thought experiment: Leaving the capital expenditures for the data centers aside, what would it take to build an OS clone of AWS?
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