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The trouble you'll run into with Oracle licensing is that, in many cases, when they say "core" they mean cores for the underlying hardware. If you are running

by luma 5y ago

The trouble you'll run into with Oracle licensing is that, in many cases, when they say "core" they mean cores for the underlying hardware. If you are running this on a virtual machine, Oracle will traditionally want you to license every core on the box underneath, even if you're only carving out 2 or 4 or whatever for the VM itself. Worse, if your VM platform supports migration (vMotion et al), they will then insist that you buy licenses for every core the workload could theoretically run on. For modern hypervisors, this often times means licensing every core in your virtualization estate. I've had Oracle licensing tell me this exact thing with a straight face. There are more than one law firms in the US which do nothing but sue Oracle on their client's behalf. When your licensing terms are so odious that multiple law firms can make a living fighting your terms.... something isn't right. "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison"

edoceo 5y ago
I replace Rich with Raging - but both work.
alberth 5y ago
Above is old info. It’s no longer billed that way. See https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf —- > “ Amazon EC2 and RDS - count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is enabled, and one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled. Microsoft Azure – count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper- threading is enabled, and one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper- threading is not enabled. When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.” The key is that last sentence.
- viraptor 5y ago
  The document is about cloud licensing. You're replying to a comment about vmotion which most likely means on-premise setup.
- izacus 5y ago
  It doesn't matter - Oracle is a company that will send lawyers and salesmen your way to threaten and try to squeeze the money out of you. We've had the case where they threathened to double per-core licensing cost of their products just because our developers wanted to use PostgreSQL in their new project. Once they get into your system they'll bleed your time and money with their licensing bullshit. You have better things to do with your company time.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  The key is "Authorized Cloud Environments", which is defined in the first paragraph: > This policy applies to cloud computing environments from the following vendors: Amazon Web Services –Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform (collectively, the ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’).This policy applies to these Oracle programs. So, only for AWS and Azure.
native_samples 5y ago
It's super confusing. There are several ways to get it. I think it's free if you run stuff in the Oracle Cloud. And the pricing on Oracle Cloud is actually quite good. But the price list is here, it seems: https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java-se-subscription-pricelist-5028356.pdf https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java... So price can vary between $25/processor/month and $12.50/month with further discounts available if you negotiate, probably. But ... this has to be rounded up to whatever the physical processor has, then multiplied by some "core factor" which can actually reduce the number of cores you need to buy from the physical number. Which can be found here: https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core... For Intel and AMD chips, the factor is 0.5 - so the actual prices are just half of those numbers! The rules about virtualization are kinda weird especially because Oracle Cloud presumably is virtualized itself. Presumably it's because if your jobs can "flex" at will then it becomes impossible to say how many cores you're actually using. Like, what do you do, integrate the area under the curve of second-by-second CPU usage or something? That would be very complicated. If they say, OK, your workload can use up to 100 cores then you pay for 100 cores, it's very simple. All you have to agree on with them is how many cores the maximum amount is. I can't imagine it would matter if the physical underlying hardware changes as long as the workload can only run on one machine at once. Otherwise it'd be impossible to run any Oracle product in any cloud at all, but people do it!
pjmlp 5y ago
Speaking from experience listening to corporate sales deals, those listed prices are just like at the street bazaar. You only get them when lacking negotiation skills, or failing to understand the whole political process from enterprise sales.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if FB only started paying 2+ years after starting the contract. As a lighthouse client, FB is pretty amazing in this space.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yeah something like that would be quite possible.
grumblenum 5y ago
If your "enterprise" software doesn't generate $18/month, then you probably don't have a viable business model and should use the community edition. I don't take the Oracle hate seriously when it's all the latest fashion to pay much, much more for your CPU because it's hosted by Amazon. The alternative of "free" services in the Google-sense (ie data-mining users to sell to third parties or develop other products) seems worse, personally.
- derefr 5y ago
  Did you even read the parent comment? It's not $18/mo; it's $18/mo/theoretically-schedulable-substrate-CPU. For people considering running this on an IaaS, that'd literally be "$18 * [number of CPUs in the entire datacenter emcompassing your AWS/GCP/Azure zone] per month". That's a higher OpEx than pretty much any single service is worth.
  - grumblenum 5y ago
    Yes, and that's trivial for useful business cases. Let's look at a service beyond reproach: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ Wow! An M5 costs $2300 a month, which is almost three times as much as Graal licensing would cost, assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864). Frankly, if a minimum wage job is a larger revenue stream than your "app", then you should probably do the minimum wage job instead. There's also a community edition. It's free. I think the moral outrage about anything Oracle-related is a hollow fashion statement, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.
    - hobs 5y ago
      Or maybe they are just historically a terrible company to work with who makes mostly shitty software and everyone knows it. There's no moral outrage over here either, just "I dont want to do business with assholes who keep fucking everyone over."
    - derefr 5y ago
      > assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864) ...no, you're still reading it wrong. It's not the number of substrate CPUs on the compute node your workload is running on. It's the number of substrate CPUs on all the compute nodes your workload could potentially ever be re-scheduled or migrated onto. I.e., all the CPUs of every single (non-reserved) compute node in the datacenter. (Or, presuming certain service-transitioning technologies, multiple datacenters!) We're talking about e.g. "the entirety of AWS EC2 us-west-2." Hundreds of thousands of machines. Millions of CPUs. By analogy: imagine there's a car-sharing service, that rents out its fleet of cars to people — but because, when you rent a car, you could theoretically end up driving any car in the rental company's fleet — they set their premium to be $18/mo * [the size of the rental company's entire rental-car fleet.] Because in theory, if you set things up just right, you could manage to drive all their cars, in one day. And so they want to charge you, at all times, for that basically-impossible worst-case upper-bound price. Do you see how insane that sounds?
amelius 5y ago
But that's what they do. Oracle is a law firm that happens to employ a few programmers.
- kaba0 5y ago
  It’s strange that all those lawyers can create top-notch CS research though..

by luma 5y ago

edoceo 5y ago

I replace Rich with Raging - but both work.

alberth 5y ago

Above is old info. It’s no longer billed that way. See https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf —- > “ Amazon EC2 and RDS - count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is enabled, and one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled. Microsoft Azure – count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper- threading is enabled, and one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper- threading is not enabled. When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.” The key is that last sentence.

viraptor 5y ago
The document is about cloud licensing. You're replying to a comment about vmotion which most likely means on-premise setup.
izacus 5y ago
It doesn't matter - Oracle is a company that will send lawyers and salesmen your way to threaten and try to squeeze the money out of you. We've had the case where they threathened to double per-core licensing cost of their products just because our developers wanted to use PostgreSQL in their new project. Once they get into your system they'll bleed your time and money with their licensing bullshit. You have better things to do with your company time.
nextaccountic 5y ago
The key is "Authorized Cloud Environments", which is defined in the first paragraph: > This policy applies to cloud computing environments from the following vendors: Amazon Web Services –Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform (collectively, the ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’).This policy applies to these Oracle programs. So, only for AWS and Azure.

native_samples 5y ago

It's super confusing. There are several ways to get it. I think it's free if you run stuff in the Oracle Cloud. And the pricing on Oracle Cloud is actually quite good. But the price list is here, it seems: https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java-se-subscription-pricelist-5028356.pdf https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/price-lists/java... So price can vary between $25/processor/month and $12.50/month with further discounts available if you negotiate, probably. But ... this has to be rounded up to whatever the physical processor has, then multiplied by some "core factor" which can actually reduce the number of cores you need to buy from the physical number. Which can be found here: https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core... For Intel and AMD chips, the factor is 0.5 - so the actual prices are just half of those numbers! The rules about virtualization are kinda weird especially because Oracle Cloud presumably is virtualized itself. Presumably it's because if your jobs can "flex" at will then it becomes impossible to say how many cores you're actually using. Like, what do you do, integrate the area under the curve of second-by-second CPU usage or something? That would be very complicated. If they say, OK, your workload can use up to 100 cores then you pay for 100 cores, it's very simple. All you have to agree on with them is how many cores the maximum amount is. I can't imagine it would matter if the physical underlying hardware changes as long as the workload can only run on one machine at once. Otherwise it'd be impossible to run any Oracle product in any cloud at all, but people do it!

pjmlp 5y ago

Speaking from experience listening to corporate sales deals, those listed prices are just like at the street bazaar. You only get them when lacking negotiation skills, or failing to understand the whole political process from enterprise sales.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if FB only started paying 2+ years after starting the contract. As a lighthouse client, FB is pretty amazing in this space.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yeah something like that would be quite possible.

grumblenum 5y ago

If your "enterprise" software doesn't generate $18/month, then you probably don't have a viable business model and should use the community edition. I don't take the Oracle hate seriously when it's all the latest fashion to pay much, much more for your CPU because it's hosted by Amazon. The alternative of "free" services in the Google-sense (ie data-mining users to sell to third parties or develop other products) seems worse, personally.

derefr 5y ago
Did you even read the parent comment? It's not $18/mo; it's $18/mo/theoretically-schedulable-substrate-CPU. For people considering running this on an IaaS, that'd literally be "$18 * [number of CPUs in the entire datacenter emcompassing your AWS/GCP/Azure zone] per month". That's a higher OpEx than pretty much any single service is worth.
- grumblenum 5y ago
  Yes, and that's trivial for useful business cases. Let's look at a service beyond reproach: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ Wow! An M5 costs $2300 a month, which is almost three times as much as Graal licensing would cost, assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864). Frankly, if a minimum wage job is a larger revenue stream than your "app", then you should probably do the minimum wage job instead. There's also a community edition. It's free. I think the moral outrage about anything Oracle-related is a hollow fashion statement, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.
  - hobs 5y ago
    Or maybe they are just historically a terrible company to work with who makes mostly shitty software and everyone knows it. There's no moral outrage over here either, just "I dont want to do business with assholes who keep fucking everyone over."
  - derefr 5y ago
    > assuming you paid for all 48 cores ($864) ...no, you're still reading it wrong. It's not the number of substrate CPUs on the compute node your workload is running on. It's the number of substrate CPUs on all the compute nodes your workload could potentially ever be re-scheduled or migrated onto. I.e., all the CPUs of every single (non-reserved) compute node in the datacenter. (Or, presuming certain service-transitioning technologies, multiple datacenters!) We're talking about e.g. "the entirety of AWS EC2 us-west-2." Hundreds of thousands of machines. Millions of CPUs. By analogy: imagine there's a car-sharing service, that rents out its fleet of cars to people — but because, when you rent a car, you could theoretically end up driving any car in the rental company's fleet — they set their premium to be $18/mo * [the size of the rental company's entire rental-car fleet.] Because in theory, if you set things up just right, you could manage to drive all their cars, in one day. And so they want to charge you, at all times, for that basically-impossible worst-case upper-bound price. Do you see how insane that sounds?

amelius 5y ago

But that's what they do. Oracle is a law firm that happens to employ a few programmers.

kaba0 5y ago
It’s strange that all those lawyers can create top-notch CS research though..