Live data from Hacker News

Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

aws.amazon.com

431–440 of 471 posts

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

#431
It took Amazon.com, a large company with tons of incentives and a strong mandate from the top floors, 7-8 years (at least!) to get out of Oracle.

I can easily imagine how "normal" companies will not have such an easy time doing so. I guess we're going to have Oracle around for a long time.

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

#432
post #342

> Across the 48 hours of Prime Day, these sources made 7.11 trillion calls to the DynamoDB API, peaking at 45.4 million requests per second. > The team added an additional 63 petabytes of storage ahead of Prime Day; the resulting fleet handled 2.1 trillion requests per day and transferred 185 petabytes of data per day. > Prime Day 2019 also relied on a massive, diverse collection of EC2 instances. The internal scalin…

The largest scale I've ever needed to work at was 2 EC2 instances (really just 1 for incoming and 1 for background SQS job handling). The numbers in that post are simply staggering to me.

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

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we built SQL Tran to do exactly that. https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran . Finishing the rewrite right now which allows us to make changes much faster.

When is it out of Beta?

In a few months, it's not so far away. If you can share your database code (data is not important), we can make sure that our parsers and translation layer work with all the code constructs you use from day 1.

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

#434
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle's new licensing requirement for Java is a bit threat to that platform. My company for technical reasons can't switch to OpenJVM so we're going to pay Oracle their new licensing money but we're not doing any greenfield Java development and are going to work towards moving our Java applications to another platform. That's an n=1 example but wouldn't be surprised if others end up migrating away, causing longterm…

I'm curious, what are the technical reasons OpenJVM won't work for you?

OpenJDK

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were told not to download any new versions of java due to oracle trying to extract money for it. Basically we are going to do the same. Purge every oracle product slowly but surely

> We were told Yeah. Say no more... If only you would have looked. Anyhow, Oracle does the following: - Contributes pretty much all of the closed source technologies (or what was originally to become closed source) of the Oracle JDK to OpenJDK, for example giving the community: JDK Flight Recorder; JDK Mission Control; ZGC; …and probably more stuff I can’t think of right now; - Ensures the Oracle JDK and the OpenJDK…

Isn't oracle only charging for support of older jdk's as well? If you just stay on the current version path of upgrading every 6 months you shouldn't have to pay for anything at all.

Does any language offer free support for years old versions?

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

#436
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article mentions that, yeah - cost savings are based on their already heavily discounted deal with Oracle.

I think OP means Amazon’s discount on AWS. Many customers on AWS have contracts that guarantee discounted rates given sufficient volume. People have commented on hn about negotiating them, and you can see some examples from recent IPO filings. Amazon (the non-AWS parts) are yet another customer of AWS, and wherever possible you should expect them to operate like one. They even buy RIs!

Oops, thanks for clarifying.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were told not to download any new versions of java due to oracle trying to extract money for it. Basically we are going to do the same. Purge every oracle product slowly but surely

> We were told Yeah. Say no more... If only you would have looked. Anyhow, Oracle does the following: - Contributes pretty much all of the closed source technologies (or what was originally to become closed source) of the Oracle JDK to OpenJDK, for example giving the community: JDK Flight Recorder; JDK Mission Control; ZGC; …and probably more stuff I can’t think of right now; - Ensures the Oracle JDK and the OpenJDK…

I am aware... I work in old school financial services there is more red tape and politics with these types of things. I am merely stating what our plans are. We don't really use Java for any new development on our team so the easier solution is to just avoid it. There is a big team that will need to switch over but that isn't our problem.

The long short of it is we aren't a booming industry and we do it for the money so one less vendor we have to send a 7 figure check to will only increase the bonus pool.

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

#438
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…

Is the AMZN 401k match still garbage? I remember it was a max of 2% paid out in stock with a 2 year vest.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sooooo.... it's not toxic anymore, but you still need to hop teams like crazy or they kick you to the curb? Your description sounds like my friends who worked there or just left, they were used for 2-4 years and then nitpicked to deny the deferred compensation stock. It's a rolling scam! But so is the rest of the new economy. I'd hate to know what it was like before. Interesting that you said "it's being fixed" trace…

It was basically as that guy described when I was there through 2015, but it really wasn't that bad. I saved enough money in the bank to quit and live off it for 6 months, and after that it was less like an oppressive life and more like a game I was playing.

I'll tell you what was REALLY stressful: Trying to find my first engineering job after graduating from college. It took almost 9 months, and I ended up in a really shitty low-paying internship. The whole time bills I couldn't pay kept piling up, and my best friend in the world (my cat) ended up passing away partly because I couldn't afford to pay for any more surgeries after putting thousands of dollars' worth on my card.

If you can land a job at Amazon, though, congratulations: You've made it. You can get a programming job anywhere in the world and make money in the 95th+ percentile. You've got health benefits, a 401k plan, life insurance, etc. If you ever get so burned out that you're crying at your desk, just quit your job, sell your shit, break your lease, and backpack around the world for a year. (Or go get a laughably easy ~$100k/year job out in the Midwest)

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

#440
post #282
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…

I'm coming up on five years, and I can tell you that the negative shit spewed in this thread is nothing I've experienced at Amazon. Is it possible some people have experienced these things, even in the last 1-5 years? Yes, it is possible. Just telling you that my experience has not been like this at all.

As with every company, which manager you have and which organization you are in makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE. Are there people here I wouldn't want to report to? You bet. Is my manager one of them? No. I even switched teams to continue reporting to my manager after they moved to a new role.

I feel compelled to say that I am in no way a shill for Amazon and have never been for any company where I've worked (I've worked in tech companies for a few decades now). When my friends complain to me about how awful Amazon is, I cringe hard and do my best to remain balanced in how I view their feedback. Some of the stories I've read and heard about other people's experiences (especially in fulfillment centers) have been super discouraging and made a lot of us angry. Hey, why don't you quit working there in protest? I've worked in a few other major companies, and I can tell you that all of them have done awful shit that made me want to quit in protest--unfortunately, quitting in protest doesn't pay the mortgage.

Post reply on HN