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Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

computerworld.com

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Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#81
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you do is deploying to Linux VMs, it'll be very hard to lock you in. If you depend on their proprietary software, you deserve what you get.

...And I suspect that if you deploy on them, they try their damned hardest to ensure that you depend on their exclusive cloud software. And to minimize data export options as much as possible.

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.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#82
Oracle has substantially more support staff and support infrastructure in place with existing (mid to large) firms than Amazon, Google, Apple (Microsoft is the exception). In a sense, their "market" and competitor is more like IBM (and Microsoft) and not Amazon, but notably, they offer prices to small firms that are lower than Amazon's at least for services that they, Oracle, do provide.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#84
Has Oracle given any details about their underlying technology, other than what we assume was acquired from Nimbula and others? Do they know how to build a datacenter for IAAS/PASS at the same level as Amazon, Google, MS?

Amazon and other large players have made fundamental innovations in how they construct custom X86 servers, Virtual servers & custom layer 2/3 networks at large scale. They don't just rack together Dell/HP servers & connect them with Cisco switches/routers, then slap a webui on top of it. That would just be putting lipstick on a pig. It doesn't matter if its a large pig with 64 Cpu cores.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it could get into all the industries, Oracle would literally be Mr. Robot's ECorp.

Or, you know, Cyberdyne Systems - the creators of SkyNet: http://www.businessinsider.com/terminator-genisys-cyberdyne-...

More like Omni Consumer Products, amirite?

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#86
AWS isn't just about EC2 though.

They offer quite an extraordinary breadth of managed services, whether it be queuing/messaging/Notifications (Kinesis, SQS, SNS), to databases (RDS, Aurora, Redshift), cluster based computing (EMR), object storage (S3), quite fine grained access control (IAM), monitoring (cloudwatch), infrastructure as code (cloudformation)....

The list goes on, I don't see this Oracle offering much more than just being a bit of a cheaper version of EC2

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#87
post #55
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good that it was possible for CIO throw away Oracle dependency just like that. Normally Oracle replacement with alternatives in big companies would be in order of decade not months or years. In those kind of places Oracle people would treat these threats as routine business discussion.

The reason for this is the way in which the db is embedded throughout the organisation. Many years of dev being done on oracle specific technologies with business logic tied up in things like plsql procs. Organisations do not realise the risk they face with closed source software. You are basically at the mercy of your vendor. I believe any a CTO/CIO worth their salt would require motivation on why to use proprietary…

There's a trade-off being made by picking proprietary software vs. open source and it's entirely about control, strange as it might sound. A good CTO/CIO has some measure of power over their vendors and can boss them around a bit like they're an employee. If the primary account manager is golf buddies with him, endangering the relationship with arm-twisting on either part isn't just business it's personal and can be viewed in some respects as stable. With open source software, you don't really have anyone you can hang over a fire that holds the kind of political weight - you don't want to have to talk to every single open source project lead or something as a super busy F500 C-level, you want less throats to choke and that your hands are big enough to wrap around them. For open source, the trend has somewhat shifted into each major open source product having a corresponding company offering the full support cycle like any other closed source vendor (Red Hat, Chef, Cloudera, Sqrrl, Puppet, etc.) so things are looking better for hybridized open source efforts today as they grow, but without some consolidation they're not going to be a full enterprise "solution" due to most of them being too specific in applications for their technologies.

As an engineer, I like to think of this primarily social problem like trying to focus a huge, distributed system architecture upon as few languages and platforms as possible. With most enterprises having grown through dozens, maybe hundreds of mergers they have a huge zoo of different stuff to support culturally. You could try integration approaches like message buses and such, but there's a lot of people overhead involved there and it gets really ugly when everyone disagrees upon the message bus (and in sufficiently large groups, conflict is inevitable).

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#89
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'Generation 2' using then? Oracle VM Manager? Enterprise Manager? A handful of bash scripts for Exalogic provisioning? Puppet and Mcollective?

From last year: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-has-special-team-worki... Basically, this is a new product from a new team comprised of a bunch of ex-Amazon engineers in Seattle, among others.

From the article:

"..Oracle has been using very aggressive tactics to sell its current cloud platform. The company's sales team has resorted to the "nuclear option" of threatening a costly and expensive audit of other Oracle software products, then offering to skip the audit if the customer agrees to add cloud services."

This will work well for them.

Re: Oracle is gunning for AWS with new infrastructure offering

#90
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for this is the way in which the db is embedded throughout the organisation. Many years of dev being done on oracle specific technologies with business logic tied up in things like plsql procs. Organisations do not realise the risk they face with closed source software. You are basically at the mercy of your vendor. I believe any a CTO/CIO worth their salt would require motivation on why to use proprietary…

There's a trade-off being made by picking proprietary software vs. open source and it's entirely about control, strange as it might sound. A good CTO/CIO has some measure of power over their vendors and can boss them around a bit like they're an employee. If the primary account manager is golf buddies with him, endangering the relationship with arm-twisting on either part isn't just business it's personal and can be…

I don't think this is a really an open vs closed source question. If anything, long term you might be better off on a closed source solution if you don't mind paying for it. To many open source projects die because something cooler comes along and the maintainers lose interest. Then you end up being the maintainer of some piece of dead open source history.

Really if your worried about becoming attached to a particular technology, you should choose from the beginning to build a heterogeneous environment, and require all your in house development to adhere. In the beginning it might be painful to assure that your software stack runs on two different databases/OSs/ec, but once the abstractions are built up it will likely result in a more stable environment, and ease porting to a third should one of your original choices die.

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