Oracle Cloud is having a major outage • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#41

Post by hdjjhhvvhga » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 9:55 PM UTC

SadTrombone wrote: post #21

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

Wow, there must be literally tens of people who are worried right now! My shitty, snarky comment aside, I am genuinely curious about why someone would choose Oracle as a cloud provider. If you look at their capex spend, it's undeniable they have so vastly underinvested in their cloud compared to AWS, Azure and GCP, that even if you were an "Oracle shop" I'm genuinely curious what benefits their cloud would offer. Edi…

I'm personally using it because they give you multiple VMs for free. 2x x86 VMs with 1GB of RAM, and 4 ARM (Ampere) VMs with 4 cores + 24GB to split up 4 ways as you see fit. All of that with a combined 200gb of block storage + 10tb of data transfer. I'm no fan of Oracle, but that's a good amount of free stuff for my hobby projects.

Unfortunately these can disappear without warning. With AWS this basically never happens.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#42

Post by mbajkowski » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #41

SadTrombone wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm personally using it because they give you multiple VMs for free. 2x x86 VMs with 1GB of RAM, and 4 ARM (Ampere) VMs with 4 cores + 24GB to split up 4 ways as you see fit. All of that with a combined 200gb of block storage + 10tb of data transfer. I'm no fan of Oracle, but that's a good amount of free stuff for my hobby projects.

Unfortunately these can disappear without warning. With AWS this basically never happens.

Can you elaborate on this? These are not preemptible, why would they disappear without warning? I've been running on these for 2 or 3 years without any issues thus far.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#43

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 10:23 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #7

Cross cloud is really complex and error prone. You'll probably cause more outages than you'll prevent by going down that path. Maybe you should consider moving to a major cloud provider that has better services.

It's not really that bad?

If you're operating at large scale you should have enough control over your own infrastructure to distribute load to multiple providers. Then if one of them is down, spin up more instances on another one.

If you're operating at small scale, store your backups on another provider, and periodically test that you can quickly restore them to that provider.

This isn't just about redundancy. Doing this is necessary to keep you from getting locked in.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#44

Post by cypress66 » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 10:35 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

Wow, there must be literally tens of people who are worried right now! My shitty, snarky comment aside, I am genuinely curious about why someone would choose Oracle as a cloud provider. If you look at their capex spend, it's undeniable they have so vastly underinvested in their cloud compared to AWS, Azure and GCP, that even if you were an "Oracle shop" I'm genuinely curious what benefits their cloud would offer. Edi…

I use it because it's much cheaper.

Bandwidth alone is an order of magnitude cheaper than AWS.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#45

Post by gtirloni » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #43

gtirloni wrote: post #7

Cross cloud is really complex and error prone. You'll probably cause more outages than you'll prevent by going down that path. Maybe you should consider moving to a major cloud provider that has better services.

It's not really that bad? If you're operating at large scale you should have enough control over your own infrastructure to distribute load to multiple providers. Then if one of them is down, spin up more instances on another one. If you're operating at small scale, store your backups on another provider, and periodically test that you can quickly restore them to that provider. This isn't just about redundancy. Doing…

> If you're operating at small scale, store your backups on another provider, and periodically test that you can quickly restore them to that provider.

Sure, but that's not what people mean when they say cross cloud. It usually implies running active workloads.

Orchestrate hundreds of workloads that each depend on one another across several clouds and they reorganize upon a failure introduces a lot of new failure modes.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#46

Post by heavyset_go » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 2:23 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

Wow, there must be literally tens of people who are worried right now! My shitty, snarky comment aside, I am genuinely curious about why someone would choose Oracle as a cloud provider. If you look at their capex spend, it's undeniable they have so vastly underinvested in their cloud compared to AWS, Azure and GCP, that even if you were an "Oracle shop" I'm genuinely curious what benefits their cloud would offer. Edi…

It's cheaper than AWS and has a good free tier. I've worked with clients who use it because Oracle or they got a really good deal with them over AWS.

It's not something I'd choose right away, but there are use cases where it can be cheaper/free compared to other options.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#47

Post by devrand » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 3:25 AM UTC

mbajkowski wrote: post #42

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately these can disappear without warning. With AWS this basically never happens.

Can you elaborate on this? These are not preemptible, why would they disappear without warning? I've been running on these for 2 or 3 years without any issues thus far.

They might be referring to their idle reclamation policy: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#48

Post by hu3 » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 3:46 AM UTC

I have a VM there but it wasn't affected. Got this e-mail from Oracle 50 minutes ago:

> Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Customer,

> Engineers and the colocation partner have successfully installed additional cooling systems to reduce ambient temperatures and mitigate the issue affecting multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services in the US East (Ashburn) region. We will continue to closely monitor this situation.

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#49

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

ben7799 wrote: post #22

internetter wrote: post #2

Well, if the status page says they are up do the SLAs really apply? (half kidding, this seems like an oracle thing to do)

As a former employee this REALLY seems like something Oracle would actually do, along with instructing employees to tell customers it wasn't actually down. It was before Oracle cloud but I literally was told to do things like that.

[deleted]

Re: Oracle Cloud is having a major outage

#50

Post by bastard_op » Sat, Jun 03, 2023, 6:08 AM UTC

The reason for outage report should be interesting.

My cousin mentioned their erp was down mid-day, and I laughed citing HN like "oh yeah, forgot you're a poor bastard oracle user." It was entirely dead, like everything apparently, most of the day. Sadly the financial people don't care, they will still cut a check to daddy Ellison monthly.

At least one large California municipality I worked with made a multi-year concerted effort to abandon the misery that is oracle erp. That said, never heard how that venture panned out with the replacement. Something about a frying pan to the fire comes to mind.