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When I heard about Oracle Cloud I'll admit I took a quick-look to see if they had any USP for "general" cloud computing customers - or even if they'd be signifi

When I heard about Oracle Cloud I'll admit I took a quick-look to see if they had any USP for "general" cloud computing customers - or even if they'd be significantly cheaper than our Azure and AWS subs to make the cost to transition worthwhile (lol, of course not)... The main reason we won't consider using Oracle Cloud is simply because Oracle has already demonstrated their sheer contempt for their own customers through their on-prem database licensing program, so I dread to think what they would do to enforce their IP rights or ToS with their cloud customers. Another reason we disregarded them (and GCP[1]) is because they simply aren't _big and successful enough_ to give us the confidence they'll keep on running into the forseeable future and with the kind of reliability we expect - and this outage incident demonstrates that they clearly aren't. I know that Azure and AWS have both had significant outage incidents in the past, but both have been rock-solid stable in recent years. For this to happen at Oracle suggests something is institutionally wrong: if they can't get 99.999% uptime on their own worldwide Cloud operations then I cannot trust them with our own SaaS platform because we promise 99.999% to our own customers. [1]I'm wary about GCP because Google hasn't issued any kind of promissory statement that GCP won't end up on the [Google Graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/)

machineko 6y ago
GCP wont be killed anytime soon its third biggest cloud provider but i can agree AWS is a lot safer bet.
cmeacham98 6y ago
> I'm wary about GCP because Google hasn't issued any kind of promissory statement that GCP won't end up on the [Google Graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/) Isn't that literally what an SLA is, a (contractually) guaranteed level of service for some interval of time?
- XorNot 6y ago
  Yes but it's also why those are a lot shorter. If Google has been signing 10 year horizon SLAs, that'd be big news.
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    Google is signing 10-year deals though: https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-google-cloud-partnership https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-...
    - floatingatoll 6y ago
      Those do not require that the services guaranteed contractually remain available to other customers for use.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        But it generally makes business sense to deprecate a system even though you need to maintain it for 2 customers for another 7 years?
    - XorNot 6y ago
      That press release doesn't say anything about Google signing an SLA that commits them to 10 years of service availability.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Google's GCP SLAs are 99.95% per month[1]. There's no mention of any guarantee that the GCP Cloud nor that specific GCP Products (like App Engine) will be supported for, say, 10+ years from now (well, 10+ years is unreasonable, but something like "at least 3 years, and with 2 years' notice of any planned discontinuation" would be nice). [1]: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/sla https://cloud.google.com/appengine/sla
  - cmeacham98 6y ago
    Those are the standard SLAs but I presume you could negotiate a better one assuming you're willing to pay? I don't know what the cost for that would be though.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Not really: an SLA for a service doesn't preclude the deprecation of the entire service.
sjg007 6y ago
The Oracle cloud is for Oracle customers. The same way the IBM cloud is for IBM customers.
- tharkun__ 6y ago
  I think the point though is that OP does not believe that Oracle has the stomach, stamina, will, call it what you will that IBM has demonstrated with say its backwards compatibility of software written for the IBM S360...
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I wonder how much computing would have advanced if in the 1980s IBM had told their big institutional bank and insurance company customers to get their program code... er... up to code because of the cost of maintaining backwards compatibility. I'd be really surprised if the incumbent legacy industries really were fine with paying IBM through the nose for the privilege of not having to hire people to stay on the upgrade treadmill (and avoid the problem of being stuck on COBOL in 2021...). If not, then that's very, very short-term thinking on their part and you'd think insurance companies of all things would know the true value of long-term thinking... Well, IBM did kinda cheat: rather than go with Microsoft's approach of making the platform backwards-compatible (e.g. by not fixing bugs that programs depend on, or introducing shims, or redirecting/intercepting calls from known older programs), IBM introduced some pretty hefty OS virtualization technology to their platforms decades before x86 virtualisation was a thing - which I imagine makes back-compat much easier.
    - tharkun__ 6y ago
      Absolutely agree. I'd call it innovation though, not cheating. They had a need and they found a good way to deal with it. Awesome! P.S.: I still remember when I told my dad I had this cool new thing, VMWare now. There were a few other "yeah, we had that on the mainframe X many decades ago" get-off-my-lawn moments like that :)
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
kyrra 6y ago
I'm a Googler, opinions are my own. The terms of use for GCP does say any product that is shut down will give at least a one-year notice before it's shut down[1]. For any given product within GCP that has been shut down the lead time has been greater than a year as far as I'm aware. The fact that Google is calling out GCP separately on its earning calls is actually somewhat of a commitment to trying to grow that business. Very few products within Google are called out separately, so that was a fairly big change. [1] https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/ > (d) Discontinuation of Services. Google will notify Customer at least 12 months before discontinuing any Service (or associated material functionality) unless Google replaces such discontinued Service or functionality with a materially similar Service or functionality.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I don't think a year is long enough though - especially for something that's unique and foundational. A complex product built using BigTable, for example, may need more than a year to migrate to something else.
  - robbintt 6y ago
    This was our conclusion with an existing gcp monolithic service.
- joshspankit 6y ago
  Runway is not enough enough of a pull when we need to heavily invest in the infrastructure initially as well as over time as we solve quirks.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  How does this compare to the terms and the actions of Amazon towards AWS?
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    People simply know that AWS isn't going anywhere. It's the Microsoft Windows of the cloud world. Google has a long history of dropping stuff relatively quickly.
jaytaylor 6y ago
Oracle OCI is one of the few cloud providers who'll actually give you two VMs for free, forever. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ Could be worth checking out.
- suyash 6y ago
  and free databases too forever
- austhrow743 6y ago
  Anyone know what "1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory each" translates to in processing power? Fine for a personal hobby web server to try out nodejs on?
  - exikyut 6y ago
    What benchmark do you want me to run? (Not `dd`. Something actually useful.)
    - austhrow743 6y ago
      None would make any sense to me. I'm working my way through freecodecamp and feel like starting to play with a server.
      - exikyut 6y ago
        That's awesome. Well, while it certainly looks (and feels) a bit like a cliché, I find myself recommending AWS for such a purpose. Common issues will be a single StackOverflow answer away. The platform (infra, byzantine pricing model) is at least well documented. The company has a reputation for making expensive honest accidents go away :). This being said, exploration and _actually having to dive into something_ can provide insight and understanding that just doesn't get mentally registered when on the mainstream path (because it all just works). And as another commenter said, you get 10TB of traffic. Which is hands-down insane. At 450Mbps too. (Boggles) (AWS is 1GB/mo, albeit at 1Gbit.)
brightball 6y ago
Fwiw, the amount of money that Google is pouring into GCP, including their own transoceanic fiber makes me believe they are committed to it more than “other” endeavors. Honestly the biggest issue with Google is that they need to dramatically improve their open source database offerings, including 3rd party vendors. RDS/Aurora eats their proverbial lunch. Azure at least bought Citus to improve their PG offering. The GCP database offerings feel like something that was put there to check the box, not to be competitive. EDIT: The non-Google database offerings.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > The GCP database offerings... On the contrary, I'd argue that BigTable, Spanner and Firestore (for Firebase) are all tentpole products that draw people in to GCP in the first place, and they stick around because GCP offers other services that probably do save the customer time and resources and are willing to use them because they've already overcome the emotional hurdle of trusting a cloud provider with their operations.
  - brightball 6y ago
    Let me limit it to the non-Google database offerings.
    - andrewflnr 6y ago
      Why, though? No one signs up for GCP because they want to be completely independent of Google products. Judging it based on non-Google DBs is (IMO, anyway) judging it on criteria that are irrelevant to its actual value proposition.
      - brightball 6y ago
        Plenty of people sign up for AWS without intending to use AWS proprietary DB’s. If GCP wants to compete with AWS they need to compete on general purpose workloads.
      - 6y ago
bigiain 6y ago
> Another reason we disregarded them (and GCP[1]) is because they simply aren't _big and successful enough_ to give us the confidence they'll keep on running into the forseeable future I've got a great big bottle of schadenfreude waiting for the day Goog announce that GCP was just somebody's 20% project and they're moving to another team - complete with an "Our fantastic journey" blog post and a new entry on all the google graveyard websites...
- Aperocky 6y ago
  GCP is probably too big even for Google to do that. Individual services under GCP though, who knows.
- tux3 6y ago
  GCP already feels too big to me to become an incredible journey, deprioritized and left to slowly bitrot I could maybe see if it fails to grow, but even for Google closing a whole Cloud Platform on this scale would be unprecedented and _extremely_ damaging. Google has lost a lot of trust and goodwill, but GCP isn't Google Reader. A sudden GCP EOL would be cataclysmic :)
  - echelon 6y ago
    Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it was already leaked that Google attached funding strings to GCP growth targets. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
    - zadokshi 6y ago
      The idea of giving up on GCP because it wasn’t the highest profit cloud provider is an interesting idea, I honestly don’t believe it. As if there would be a call. “we’re only number 2 in cloud computing so we are shutting down”. Does google really make that kind of decision. It feels like giving up on the internet because they didn’t win.
samurai_noobie 6y ago
Their SLA is 99.99 for most services. I know aws just recently had an outage for a couple of hours. Normal for cloud computing businesses
- johnmaguire 6y ago
  Not worldwide
cett 6y ago
There is a distinct lack of GCP products on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Would you avoid AWS because of Fire Phone?
- aesyondu 6y ago
  Perhaps a better comparison would be, https://killedbyamazon.com/ https://killedbyamazon.com/ (or killedbyaws?), which I don't think exists at all.
  - exikyut 6y ago
    Genuine question: did you check that domain before you posted your comment? Because if it didn't exist, well, it does now. It's sitting on one of those existentially-depressing parking pages. And ironically has a hilariously broken (go and see) HTTPS cert.
    - aesyondu 6y ago
      > Genuine question: did you check that domain before you posted your comment? Indeed I did. It showed me some generic buy-this-domain website with no substantial/relevant info (actual products killed by the Amazon mega corporation). Nevertheless I presented my comment as a concept of `a website that lists the products killed by Amazon`, which could have been located in https://productskilledbyamazon.com https://productskilledbyamazon.com, for all I know. It would be more interesting to find out if such website actually exists. EDIT: A quick internet search does not net me any results. Which is why I'm skeptical it actually exists.
stephenhuey 6y ago
It’s one thing to be wary of experimental new consumer products like many Google has tried and discarded, but I can assure you I have personally observed vast amounts of money poured into GCP in the enterprise realm and even if they retire a GCP product here and there, most of the myriad products in GCP will be around making money for quite a while!
- vineyardmike 6y ago
  > even if they retire a GCP product here and there, most of the myriad products in GCP will be around making money for quite a while! Sad reality if your business depended on that retired product though.
us0r 6y ago
> I'm wary about GCP because Google hasn't issued any kind of promissory statement that GCP won't end up on the [Google Graveyard] Snapchat paying them $400 MILLION per year takes care of this issue. That's 1 company. A few jaw dropping others have popped up in S-1 filings.
- reilly3000 6y ago
  Ya I don’t worry about GCP going away. As a B2B service, they have contracts with customers that would be very expensive for them to break. Also, their internal tools track very closely with GCP offerings AFAIK. The have found financial leverage in plowing profits into cloud CapEx, so renting out that gear is all incremental profit.
- capableweb 6y ago
  So then it shouldn't be impossible for Google to go out and give potential customers some sort of guarantee that they'll be around? But still doesn't seem to happen, hence people hesitate. And even if the entire GCP might never disappear, Google is famous for shutting things down so I could imagine people get upset when GCP is closing down individual features people are still using.
  - KptMarchewa 6y ago
    >Google is famous for shutting things down Google is famous for shutting down consumer services. It very rarely shuts down major business facing services.

machineko 6y ago

GCP wont be killed anytime soon its third biggest cloud provider but i can agree AWS is a lot safer bet.

cmeacham98 6y ago

> I'm wary about GCP because Google hasn't issued any kind of promissory statement that GCP won't end up on the [Google Graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/) Isn't that literally what an SLA is, a (contractually) guaranteed level of service for some interval of time?

XorNot 6y ago
Yes but it's also why those are a lot shorter. If Google has been signing 10 year horizon SLAs, that'd be big news.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Google is signing 10-year deals though: https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-google-cloud-partnership https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-...
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    Those do not require that the services guaranteed contractually remain available to other customers for use.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      But it generally makes business sense to deprecate a system even though you need to maintain it for 2 customers for another 7 years?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    That press release doesn't say anything about Google signing an SLA that commits them to 10 years of service availability.
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Google's GCP SLAs are 99.95% per month[1]. There's no mention of any guarantee that the GCP Cloud nor that specific GCP Products (like App Engine) will be supported for, say, 10+ years from now (well, 10+ years is unreasonable, but something like "at least 3 years, and with 2 years' notice of any planned discontinuation" would be nice). [1]: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/sla https://cloud.google.com/appengine/sla
- cmeacham98 6y ago
  Those are the standard SLAs but I presume you could negotiate a better one assuming you're willing to pay? I don't know what the cost for that would be though.
Clewza313 6y ago
Not really: an SLA for a service doesn't preclude the deprecation of the entire service.

sjg007 6y ago

The Oracle cloud is for Oracle customers. The same way the IBM cloud is for IBM customers.

tharkun__ 6y ago
I think the point though is that OP does not believe that Oracle has the stomach, stamina, will, call it what you will that IBM has demonstrated with say its backwards compatibility of software written for the IBM S360...
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I wonder how much computing would have advanced if in the 1980s IBM had told their big institutional bank and insurance company customers to get their program code... er... up to code because of the cost of maintaining backwards compatibility. I'd be really surprised if the incumbent legacy industries really were fine with paying IBM through the nose for the privilege of not having to hire people to stay on the upgrade treadmill (and avoid the problem of being stuck on COBOL in 2021...). If not, then that's very, very short-term thinking on their part and you'd think insurance companies of all things would know the true value of long-term thinking... Well, IBM did kinda cheat: rather than go with Microsoft's approach of making the platform backwards-compatible (e.g. by not fixing bugs that programs depend on, or introducing shims, or redirecting/intercepting calls from known older programs), IBM introduced some pretty hefty OS virtualization technology to their platforms decades before x86 virtualisation was a thing - which I imagine makes back-compat much easier.
  - tharkun__ 6y ago
    Absolutely agree. I'd call it innovation though, not cheating. They had a need and they found a good way to deal with it. Awesome! P.S.: I still remember when I told my dad I had this cool new thing, VMWare now. There were a few other "yeah, we had that on the mainframe X many decades ago" get-off-my-lawn moments like that :)
- tannhaeuser 6y ago

kyrra 6y ago

I'm a Googler, opinions are my own. The terms of use for GCP does say any product that is shut down will give at least a one-year notice before it's shut down[1]. For any given product within GCP that has been shut down the lead time has been greater than a year as far as I'm aware. The fact that Google is calling out GCP separately on its earning calls is actually somewhat of a commitment to trying to grow that business. Very few products within Google are called out separately, so that was a fairly big change. [1] https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/ > (d) Discontinuation of Services. Google will notify Customer at least 12 months before discontinuing any Service (or associated material functionality) unless Google replaces such discontinued Service or functionality with a materially similar Service or functionality.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I don't think a year is long enough though - especially for something that's unique and foundational. A complex product built using BigTable, for example, may need more than a year to migrate to something else.
- robbintt 6y ago
  This was our conclusion with an existing gcp monolithic service.
joshspankit 6y ago
Runway is not enough enough of a pull when we need to heavily invest in the infrastructure initially as well as over time as we solve quirks.
floatingatoll 6y ago
How does this compare to the terms and the actions of Amazon towards AWS?
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  People simply know that AWS isn't going anywhere. It's the Microsoft Windows of the cloud world. Google has a long history of dropping stuff relatively quickly.

jaytaylor 6y ago

Oracle OCI is one of the few cloud providers who'll actually give you two VMs for free, forever. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ Could be worth checking out.

suyash 6y ago
and free databases too forever
austhrow743 6y ago
Anyone know what "1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory each" translates to in processing power? Fine for a personal hobby web server to try out nodejs on?
- exikyut 6y ago
  What benchmark do you want me to run? (Not `dd`. Something actually useful.)
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    None would make any sense to me. I'm working my way through freecodecamp and feel like starting to play with a server.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      That's awesome. Well, while it certainly looks (and feels) a bit like a cliché, I find myself recommending AWS for such a purpose. Common issues will be a single StackOverflow answer away. The platform (infra, byzantine pricing model) is at least well documented. The company has a reputation for making expensive honest accidents go away :). This being said, exploration and _actually having to dive into something_ can provide insight and understanding that just doesn't get mentally registered when on the mainstream path (because it all just works). And as another commenter said, you get 10TB of traffic. Which is hands-down insane. At 450Mbps too. (Boggles) (AWS is 1GB/mo, albeit at 1Gbit.)

brightball 6y ago

Fwiw, the amount of money that Google is pouring into GCP, including their own transoceanic fiber makes me believe they are committed to it more than “other” endeavors. Honestly the biggest issue with Google is that they need to dramatically improve their open source database offerings, including 3rd party vendors. RDS/Aurora eats their proverbial lunch. Azure at least bought Citus to improve their PG offering. The GCP database offerings feel like something that was put there to check the box, not to be competitive. EDIT: The non-Google database offerings.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> The GCP database offerings... On the contrary, I'd argue that BigTable, Spanner and Firestore (for Firebase) are all tentpole products that draw people in to GCP in the first place, and they stick around because GCP offers other services that probably do save the customer time and resources and are willing to use them because they've already overcome the emotional hurdle of trusting a cloud provider with their operations.
- brightball 6y ago
  Let me limit it to the non-Google database offerings.
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Why, though? No one signs up for GCP because they want to be completely independent of Google products. Judging it based on non-Google DBs is (IMO, anyway) judging it on criteria that are irrelevant to its actual value proposition.
    - brightball 6y ago
      Plenty of people sign up for AWS without intending to use AWS proprietary DB’s. If GCP wants to compete with AWS they need to compete on general purpose workloads.
    - 6y ago

bigiain 6y ago

> Another reason we disregarded them (and GCP[1]) is because they simply aren't _big and successful enough_ to give us the confidence they'll keep on running into the forseeable future I've got a great big bottle of schadenfreude waiting for the day Goog announce that GCP was just somebody's 20% project and they're moving to another team - complete with an "Our fantastic journey" blog post and a new entry on all the google graveyard websites...

Aperocky 6y ago
GCP is probably too big even for Google to do that. Individual services under GCP though, who knows.
tux3 6y ago
GCP already feels too big to me to become an incredible journey, deprioritized and left to slowly bitrot I could maybe see if it fails to grow, but even for Google closing a whole Cloud Platform on this scale would be unprecedented and _extremely_ damaging. Google has lost a lot of trust and goodwill, but GCP isn't Google Reader. A sudden GCP EOL would be cataclysmic :)
- echelon 6y ago
  Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it was already leaked that Google attached funding strings to GCP growth targets. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
  - zadokshi 6y ago
    The idea of giving up on GCP because it wasn’t the highest profit cloud provider is an interesting idea, I honestly don’t believe it. As if there would be a call. “we’re only number 2 in cloud computing so we are shutting down”. Does google really make that kind of decision. It feels like giving up on the internet because they didn’t win.

samurai_noobie 6y ago

Their SLA is 99.99 for most services. I know aws just recently had an outage for a couple of hours. Normal for cloud computing businesses

johnmaguire 6y ago
Not worldwide

cett 6y ago

There is a distinct lack of GCP products on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Would you avoid AWS because of Fire Phone?

aesyondu 6y ago
Perhaps a better comparison would be, https://killedbyamazon.com/ https://killedbyamazon.com/ (or killedbyaws?), which I don't think exists at all.
- exikyut 6y ago
  Genuine question: did you check that domain before you posted your comment? Because if it didn't exist, well, it does now. It's sitting on one of those existentially-depressing parking pages. And ironically has a hilariously broken (go and see) HTTPS cert.
  - aesyondu 6y ago
    > Genuine question: did you check that domain before you posted your comment? Indeed I did. It showed me some generic buy-this-domain website with no substantial/relevant info (actual products killed by the Amazon mega corporation). Nevertheless I presented my comment as a concept of `a website that lists the products killed by Amazon`, which could have been located in https://productskilledbyamazon.com https://productskilledbyamazon.com, for all I know. It would be more interesting to find out if such website actually exists. EDIT: A quick internet search does not net me any results. Which is why I'm skeptical it actually exists.

stephenhuey 6y ago

It’s one thing to be wary of experimental new consumer products like many Google has tried and discarded, but I can assure you I have personally observed vast amounts of money poured into GCP in the enterprise realm and even if they retire a GCP product here and there, most of the myriad products in GCP will be around making money for quite a while!

vineyardmike 6y ago
> even if they retire a GCP product here and there, most of the myriad products in GCP will be around making money for quite a while! Sad reality if your business depended on that retired product though.

us0r 6y ago

> I'm wary about GCP because Google hasn't issued any kind of promissory statement that GCP won't end up on the [Google Graveyard] Snapchat paying them $400 MILLION per year takes care of this issue. That's 1 company. A few jaw dropping others have popped up in S-1 filings.

reilly3000 6y ago
Ya I don’t worry about GCP going away. As a B2B service, they have contracts with customers that would be very expensive for them to break. Also, their internal tools track very closely with GCP offerings AFAIK. The have found financial leverage in plowing profits into cloud CapEx, so renting out that gear is all incremental profit.
capableweb 6y ago
So then it shouldn't be impossible for Google to go out and give potential customers some sort of guarantee that they'll be around? But still doesn't seem to happen, hence people hesitate. And even if the entire GCP might never disappear, Google is famous for shutting things down so I could imagine people get upset when GCP is closing down individual features people are still using.
- KptMarchewa 6y ago
  >Google is famous for shutting things down Google is famous for shutting down consumer services. It very rarely shuts down major business facing services.