11 ms·

Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid

127 points by us0r 8y ago

manigandham 8y ago
It's sad that these politics might win because the Oracle cloud is one of the worst products I've ever used, especially from such a massive company that could easily put out something better if it wasn't the epitome of misery in customer relations led by clueless management.
- LarrysNeighbor 8y ago
  Will you please elaborate? I'm looking to evaluate it myself, and curious to hear what issues you ran into with it.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    - Several slow disjointed UI consoles that will log you out when switching. The services dashboard has permanent warning that it might not show everything and you should just "retry the operation". The nav menu doesn't fit the names of the menu choices so you dont know what to click on. Same things are named differently depending on which console you're in. There is no categorization or organization of what is where. Would be 1000x improved if they just remembered your current tenant name in a damn cookie. - Support is so hard to reach that you need support to get support. Requires creating a separate user account just to file a ticket and I've since been unable to log back in because the Oracle SSO was somehow not connected to our tenant's identity instance (which I cant find in our console), but I cant get them to reset since I must file tickets from that account. There seem to be 3 different documentation sites and they link to PDF books. - There are only 4 regions globally, 2 in the US. No concept of availability zones. Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux. In past 2 weeks, there were 3 emergency maintenance events. Maintenance is not automatic and there is no concept of "live migration" or any attempt to not reboot your VM. Networking is nowhere near listed capacity in use. - Managed services are completely separated from IaaS resources. They can take hours to deploy. Less control (as expected) but still require maintenance packs to be applied manually. Maintenance can also take hours. Event hubs service doesn't even show you how much disk is available. Seems like they are nothing more than templates to trigger some instances in a hidden cloud account. - There is no pricing within the console so you must reference documentation. This doesn't cover any hidden pricing for operations. There is no billing dashboard anywhere, so you don't know costs at all until the bill comes. - Too tired to list anything else. There is no advantage compared to any other cloud or even 2nd tier colo. The prices are also more expensive. It is a nightmare we are forced to use for the integration cloud since Oracle has no modern concept of "apps" for any of its products.
    - itronitron 8y ago
      a lot of the issues you list would likely be considered desirable features by DOD standards
  - sfifs 8y ago
    Took us a month to get our data out because there's apparently no offline data copy option available from their data center.
Crontab 8y ago
Oracle: the company who would ruin the software industry just to win a lawsuit against Google. Fuck em.
- gaius 8y ago
  Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is doing.
  - provost 8y ago
    > Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is doing. Could you elaborate on why this is a good thing?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ReverseCold 8y ago
Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc? I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.
- jayonsoftware 8y ago
  Ever been to DMV ?
  - kss238 8y ago
    Counterpoint: USPS is cheaper than any other carrier for me.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - coredog64 8y ago
      AIUI, other vendors aren't allowed to undercut USPS on price. Instead they focus on UX for their particular niche.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Almost all states are using outsourced DMV in a can solutions that really suck.
- ams6110 8y ago
  For the most part, they don't know how to do it, and people who are good at it have better opportunities than government jobs
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  It just takes a lot of people and experience to do that. There are a few companies out there that can are already set up well for that. I don't know if I'd put Oracle in that list but Amazon isn't the only one with the experience.
  - 8y ago
oneplane 8y ago
So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? That sounds like about half the stuff you get with politics and lawyers. I thought you'd get something more factual with technology, but I guess Oracle is more like a lawyer-lobby business that just happens to make or resell software.
- sherminfermin 8y ago
  > So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid. > Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion-dollar deal.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    They are allowed to bid. They just want the Pentagon to split its information across multiple cloud products because they find it unlikely that they'll win such a big contract on merit alone. > The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department’s technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September. What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality".
    - hueving 8y ago
      What rational reason would a large organization with such sensitive information have to move to the cloud at all? This seems horrifically stupid from an organizational and informational risk perspective.
ams6110 8y ago
There was a time when Oracle's database product was kind of like IBM mainframes. If you could afford it, and really needed its capabilities, there was no substitute. As a result, their sales and business practices focus on selling huge deployments to Big Enterprise and large government contracts. Not surprising they never really made inroads with small developers and startups, and why they have the reputation they do in that community.
- larkeith 8y ago
  In my experience, Oracle's been doing a wonderful job at spreading their current reputation beyond the smaller developers community.
- robbyt 8y ago
  Why do you think they never won the hearts of the people who actually had to use the product?
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Well, I used Oracle rdbms for a number of years and quite liked it. Their business applications on the other hand I have never used but have heard they are pretty much horrible.
    - enraged_camel 8y ago
      They indeed are horrible. What is worse is that, out of the box, they don't do much, and the stuff they do is guaranteed to not fit your business. So you end up needing customization, and that's when shit gets real expensive.
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    I love oracle db and so do lots of dbas.
    - gaius 8y ago
      Oracle the core-RDBMS is great. It’s everything they’ve layered on top of it, like the ERP stuff, that is horrific. But now Oracle is going to companies and saying hey you don’t need DBAs, use our cloud. The right thing for all Oracle DBAs to do right now is to push for their orgs to move wholescale to Postgres. Hit Oracle where it hurts.
chris_wot 8y ago
I can’t say this often, but I want Amazon to win this deal now.
diebir 8y ago
Oracle, I have a proposition for you. Why don't you release Java and then curl up and die? There is not a reason for you to exist. Your mojo was 20 years ago, why prolong the agony. Save us all trouble and go home.
- abledon 8y ago
  Would it be possible that when the old guard die or retire at oracle a new guard would be more open and similar to Microsoft’s new stance on open source ?
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    No. Oracle is all about delivering minimal viable product to institutional customers.
    - abledon 8y ago
      What percentage required of Alphabet+Amazon total capital would be required to just buy oracle and make java totally open source? Edit: make _all_ products open source Apache license style
      - koolba 8y ago
        What? Java is open source and there have been open source JDKs for many years.
        abledon 8y ago
        Well, GPL is copyleft right? So I mean making the license less restrictive https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/401zm9/eli5_the_google_openjdk_vs_oracle_dispute/ https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comment...
- gary__ 8y ago
  I'm told Oracle's RDBMS has top notch performance at scale - I'd be interested to hear some informed discussion on the topic.
icegreentea2 8y ago
Worth considering the anti-amazon lobby's position (I really would not want Oracle to get a single slice of the pie though). Is there a good reason for this contract to a single cloud service provider? AWS already runs the CIA's private cloud.
anoncoward1234 8y ago
I currently work as a solutions engineer on Oracle Cloud. The product is absolute garbage and I'm miserable. If anyone has any good leads on other positions please let me know!
- jeffbarr 8y ago
  Happy to help - there are plenty of open positions on the AWS team!
  - AnonCoward222 8y ago
    Hey thanks for the kind words, I sent you an email. Have a great weekend!
    - blauditore 8y ago
      Are you the same person, and if so, why a different account??
      - anoncoward1234 8y ago
        Yes, sorry it is the same person, I apologize for the confusion. I was eating dinner and was using my phone and then came home and switched to my computer. In retrospect I can see how that might seem offputting.
      - astura 8y ago
        Forgot the password to the throwaway?
- rosstex 8y ago
  I was expecting "Happy to answer any questions you have!", but this was a refreshing twist. Hoping for the best bud.
- pram 8y ago
  Yeah I worked in PDIT on some of the cloud stuff and it was a sad joke. Get out, you won’t regret it.
notananthem 8y ago
Sounds like Oracle's core business of fucking everyone up for no reason. Larry you are a true POS <3
suyash 8y ago
Amazon is definitely the current leader but in order to to make it a monopoly, competetion in cloud should be encouraged that will improve offereing and bring prices down for majority of the users.
aidos 8y ago
Cheap, but let’s all enjoy Larry Ellison on “the cloud” https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY
youdontknowtho 8y ago
I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amazon hasn't been lobbying agencies and congress to get their business? Why do you think that Bezos bought the Washington Post? Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad.
- manigandham 8y ago
  And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public.
  - haimez 8y ago
    Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest. Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority. They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.
  - youdontknowtho 8y ago
    Oh my god. I get it. You like Amazon. Sorry, I'm just more cynical than I think allows me to be polite at times. I'm really not trying to be rude. I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it. The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.
fibers 8y ago
People hate Oracle because they hate competition.
colek42 8y ago
Please no, I do not want to use Oracle anything. We are finally starting to embrace open source in this sector.
davesque 8y ago
I'm calling it now. Oracle will succeed and be the primary benefactor of these efforts. We've already seen that they're in bed with Trump: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankrolling-devin-nunes https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankr.... The only things Trump understands are money and favors.
tboyd47 8y ago
Weird how you never see HN so pro- or anti- a company as when Oracle is mentioned.
mrb 8y ago
I think it's a terrible idea for the DoD (of all departments) to move all their infrastructure to any commercial cloud, Amazon or Oracle. So much critical infrastructure in the hands of a single company. What could possibly go wrong? They get hacked, experience significant outages, or worse, go out of business, and poof there goes all of the DoD's infrastructure... Whoever wins the bid will definitely become "too big to fail".
- astura 8y ago
  I see you aren't familiar with the DoD's (non-critical) infrastructure. Self hosted services go down for not insignificant periods of time not infrequently. Half the time if something goes down and the wrong person is out of the office, it doesn't get fixed until they come back. I think fragmentation is the problem. (Disclaimer: I've been out of the defense contracting business for some time)
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  It kind of shocks me that the DoD isn't looking for a vendor-agnostic implementation and then using the resources of multiple vendors. Not only is it key for resiliency from failure, but also it guarantees price competition, whereas being dependent on one vendor lets them jack up the price for all future transactions.
  - coredog64 8y ago
    Vendor agnostic solutions come with overhead. Check out the PCF sizing tool. Running just the EC2 instances required to _manage_ a production environment starts at $30k/year per region using 1 year RIs. That doesn't include the Diego compute nodes that actually run your workload. What do you get out of the deal? Software that makes AWS look like...AWS. All three vendors appear to have settled on Kubernetes as the next level of abstraction. It would be great to see dollars that would have otherwise gone to Oracle enhance the capabilities of k8s.
gameswithgo 8y ago
If anyone in the government is reading this, don't go with oracle please. Not an efficient use of money.
fapjacks 8y ago
Oh, of course Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle the trash company. Surprise, surprise.
s2g 8y ago
> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company sounds reasonable.
hueving 8y ago
About the only good thing that could come from this is destroying the ability for the DoD to move anything to the cloud. Huge SaaS and IaaS companies are squids wrapping their tentacles around everyone's data and sucking the autonomy out of organizations. An upstream connectivity outage should be nothing more than an inconvenience, not your lifeline to your lifeline to your only provider of your digital business process and records.
jshaqaw 8y ago
Drain the swamp indeed.
billsmithaustin 8y ago
Oracle should go straight to the top: buy advertising time on Fox & Friends.

127 points by us0r 8y ago

It's sad that these politics might win because the Oracle cloud is one of the worst products I've ever used, especially from such a massive company that could easily put out something better if it wasn't the epitome of misery in customer relations led by clueless management.

LarrysNeighbor 8y ago
Will you please elaborate? I'm looking to evaluate it myself, and curious to hear what issues you ran into with it.
- manigandham 8y ago
  - Several slow disjointed UI consoles that will log you out when switching. The services dashboard has permanent warning that it might not show everything and you should just "retry the operation". The nav menu doesn't fit the names of the menu choices so you dont know what to click on. Same things are named differently depending on which console you're in. There is no categorization or organization of what is where. Would be 1000x improved if they just remembered your current tenant name in a damn cookie. - Support is so hard to reach that you need support to get support. Requires creating a separate user account just to file a ticket and I've since been unable to log back in because the Oracle SSO was somehow not connected to our tenant's identity instance (which I cant find in our console), but I cant get them to reset since I must file tickets from that account. There seem to be 3 different documentation sites and they link to PDF books. - There are only 4 regions globally, 2 in the US. No concept of availability zones. Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux. In past 2 weeks, there were 3 emergency maintenance events. Maintenance is not automatic and there is no concept of "live migration" or any attempt to not reboot your VM. Networking is nowhere near listed capacity in use. - Managed services are completely separated from IaaS resources. They can take hours to deploy. Less control (as expected) but still require maintenance packs to be applied manually. Maintenance can also take hours. Event hubs service doesn't even show you how much disk is available. Seems like they are nothing more than templates to trigger some instances in a hidden cloud account. - There is no pricing within the console so you must reference documentation. This doesn't cover any hidden pricing for operations. There is no billing dashboard anywhere, so you don't know costs at all until the bill comes. - Too tired to list anything else. There is no advantage compared to any other cloud or even 2nd tier colo. The prices are also more expensive. It is a nightmare we are forced to use for the integration cloud since Oracle has no modern concept of "apps" for any of its products.
  - itronitron 8y ago
    a lot of the issues you list would likely be considered desirable features by DOD standards
- sfifs 8y ago
  Took us a month to get our data out because there's apparently no offline data copy option available from their data center.

Crontab 8y ago

Oracle: the company who would ruin the software industry just to win a lawsuit against Google. Fuck em.

gaius 8y ago
Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is doing.
- provost 8y ago
  > Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is doing. Could you elaborate on why this is a good thing?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ReverseCold 8y ago

Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc? I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.

jayonsoftware 8y ago
Ever been to DMV ?
- kss238 8y ago
  Counterpoint: USPS is cheaper than any other carrier for me.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - coredog64 8y ago
    AIUI, other vendors aren't allowed to undercut USPS on price. Instead they focus on UX for their particular niche.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Almost all states are using outsourced DMV in a can solutions that really suck.
ams6110 8y ago
For the most part, they don't know how to do it, and people who are good at it have better opportunities than government jobs
jethro_tell 8y ago
It just takes a lot of people and experience to do that. There are a few companies out there that can are already set up well for that. I don't know if I'd put Oracle in that list but Amazon isn't the only one with the experience.
- 8y ago

oneplane 8y ago

So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? That sounds like about half the stuff you get with politics and lawyers. I thought you'd get something more factual with technology, but I guess Oracle is more like a lawyer-lobby business that just happens to make or resell software.

sherminfermin 8y ago
> So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid. > Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion-dollar deal.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  They are allowed to bid. They just want the Pentagon to split its information across multiple cloud products because they find it unlikely that they'll win such a big contract on merit alone. > The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department’s technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September. What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality".
  - hueving 8y ago
    What rational reason would a large organization with such sensitive information have to move to the cloud at all? This seems horrifically stupid from an organizational and informational risk perspective.

ams6110 8y ago

There was a time when Oracle's database product was kind of like IBM mainframes. If you could afford it, and really needed its capabilities, there was no substitute. As a result, their sales and business practices focus on selling huge deployments to Big Enterprise and large government contracts. Not surprising they never really made inroads with small developers and startups, and why they have the reputation they do in that community.

larkeith 8y ago
In my experience, Oracle's been doing a wonderful job at spreading their current reputation beyond the smaller developers community.
robbyt 8y ago
Why do you think they never won the hearts of the people who actually had to use the product?
- ams6110 8y ago
  Well, I used Oracle rdbms for a number of years and quite liked it. Their business applications on the other hand I have never used but have heard they are pretty much horrible.
  - enraged_camel 8y ago
    They indeed are horrible. What is worse is that, out of the box, they don't do much, and the stuff they do is guaranteed to not fit your business. So you end up needing customization, and that's when shit gets real expensive.
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  I love oracle db and so do lots of dbas.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Oracle the core-RDBMS is great. It’s everything they’ve layered on top of it, like the ERP stuff, that is horrific. But now Oracle is going to companies and saying hey you don’t need DBAs, use our cloud. The right thing for all Oracle DBAs to do right now is to push for their orgs to move wholescale to Postgres. Hit Oracle where it hurts.

chris_wot 8y ago

I can’t say this often, but I want Amazon to win this deal now.

diebir 8y ago

Oracle, I have a proposition for you. Why don't you release Java and then curl up and die? There is not a reason for you to exist. Your mojo was 20 years ago, why prolong the agony. Save us all trouble and go home.

abledon 8y ago
Would it be possible that when the old guard die or retire at oracle a new guard would be more open and similar to Microsoft’s new stance on open source ?
- Spooky23 8y ago
  No. Oracle is all about delivering minimal viable product to institutional customers.
  - abledon 8y ago
    What percentage required of Alphabet+Amazon total capital would be required to just buy oracle and make java totally open source? Edit: make _all_ products open source Apache license style
    - koolba 8y ago
      What? Java is open source and there have been open source JDKs for many years.
      - abledon 8y ago
        Well, GPL is copyleft right? So I mean making the license less restrictive https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/401zm9/eli5_the_google_openjdk_vs_oracle_dispute/ https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comment...
gary__ 8y ago
I'm told Oracle's RDBMS has top notch performance at scale - I'd be interested to hear some informed discussion on the topic.

icegreentea2 8y ago

Worth considering the anti-amazon lobby's position (I really would not want Oracle to get a single slice of the pie though). Is there a good reason for this contract to a single cloud service provider? AWS already runs the CIA's private cloud.

anoncoward1234 8y ago

I currently work as a solutions engineer on Oracle Cloud. The product is absolute garbage and I'm miserable. If anyone has any good leads on other positions please let me know!

jeffbarr 8y ago
Happy to help - there are plenty of open positions on the AWS team!
- AnonCoward222 8y ago
  Hey thanks for the kind words, I sent you an email. Have a great weekend!
  - blauditore 8y ago
    Are you the same person, and if so, why a different account??
    - anoncoward1234 8y ago
      Yes, sorry it is the same person, I apologize for the confusion. I was eating dinner and was using my phone and then came home and switched to my computer. In retrospect I can see how that might seem offputting.
    - astura 8y ago
      Forgot the password to the throwaway?
rosstex 8y ago
I was expecting "Happy to answer any questions you have!", but this was a refreshing twist. Hoping for the best bud.
pram 8y ago
Yeah I worked in PDIT on some of the cloud stuff and it was a sad joke. Get out, you won’t regret it.

notananthem 8y ago

Sounds like Oracle's core business of fucking everyone up for no reason. Larry you are a true POS <3

suyash 8y ago

Amazon is definitely the current leader but in order to to make it a monopoly, competetion in cloud should be encouraged that will improve offereing and bring prices down for majority of the users.

aidos 8y ago

Cheap, but let’s all enjoy Larry Ellison on “the cloud” https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY

youdontknowtho 8y ago

I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amazon hasn't been lobbying agencies and congress to get their business? Why do you think that Bezos bought the Washington Post? Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad.

manigandham 8y ago
And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public.
- haimez 8y ago
  Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest. Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority. They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.
- youdontknowtho 8y ago
  Oh my god. I get it. You like Amazon. Sorry, I'm just more cynical than I think allows me to be polite at times. I'm really not trying to be rude. I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it. The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.

fibers 8y ago

People hate Oracle because they hate competition.

colek42 8y ago

Please no, I do not want to use Oracle anything. We are finally starting to embrace open source in this sector.

davesque 8y ago

I'm calling it now. Oracle will succeed and be the primary benefactor of these efforts. We've already seen that they're in bed with Trump: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankrolling-devin-nunes https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankr.... The only things Trump understands are money and favors.

tboyd47 8y ago

Weird how you never see HN so pro- or anti- a company as when Oracle is mentioned.

mrb 8y ago

I think it's a terrible idea for the DoD (of all departments) to move all their infrastructure to any commercial cloud, Amazon or Oracle. So much critical infrastructure in the hands of a single company. What could possibly go wrong? They get hacked, experience significant outages, or worse, go out of business, and poof there goes all of the DoD's infrastructure... Whoever wins the bid will definitely become "too big to fail".

astura 8y ago
I see you aren't familiar with the DoD's (non-critical) infrastructure. Self hosted services go down for not insignificant periods of time not infrequently. Half the time if something goes down and the wrong person is out of the office, it doesn't get fixed until they come back. I think fragmentation is the problem. (Disclaimer: I've been out of the defense contracting business for some time)
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
It kind of shocks me that the DoD isn't looking for a vendor-agnostic implementation and then using the resources of multiple vendors. Not only is it key for resiliency from failure, but also it guarantees price competition, whereas being dependent on one vendor lets them jack up the price for all future transactions.
- coredog64 8y ago
  Vendor agnostic solutions come with overhead. Check out the PCF sizing tool. Running just the EC2 instances required to _manage_ a production environment starts at $30k/year per region using 1 year RIs. That doesn't include the Diego compute nodes that actually run your workload. What do you get out of the deal? Software that makes AWS look like...AWS. All three vendors appear to have settled on Kubernetes as the next level of abstraction. It would be great to see dollars that would have otherwise gone to Oracle enhance the capabilities of k8s.

gameswithgo 8y ago

If anyone in the government is reading this, don't go with oracle please. Not an efficient use of money.

fapjacks 8y ago

Oh, of course Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle the trash company. Surprise, surprise.

s2g 8y ago

> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company sounds reasonable.

hueving 8y ago

About the only good thing that could come from this is destroying the ability for the DoD to move anything to the cloud. Huge SaaS and IaaS companies are squids wrapping their tentacles around everyone's data and sucking the autonomy out of organizations. An upstream connectivity outage should be nothing more than an inconvenience, not your lifeline to your lifeline to your only provider of your digital business process and records.

jshaqaw 8y ago

Drain the swamp indeed.

billsmithaustin 8y ago

Oracle should go straight to the top: buy advertising time on Fox & Friends.