3 ms·

It's somewhat surprising that Oracle isn't even mentioned in the article.

by powera 5y ago

tomrod 5y ago
It's not terribly surprising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 Oracle is rich for shrewd business arrangements. I'm not sure its considered a good company technically?
- tux3 5y ago
  With only very little snark, I'm more than happy to nominate many Microsoft products for the same category of top down B2B sales that Oracle occupies. You don't chose to use MS Teams. Someone sells it to your employees. On a technical level, Teams technically works.. some of the time. No one picked Azure because they have better tech. You pick Azure either for business reasons, or because they exclusively offer something you need. I have encountered more bugs, incorrect documentation, and operations mysteriously hanging for 20 minutes in a couple weeks of Azure usage than in years of GCP and AWS use. It is not even close. And I will refrain, with great effort, from speaking about the confused inconsistent mess that is Azure Active Directory.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    Microsoft Azure Active Directory is a great example of Microsoft's habit of using buzzwords to indicate chronology rather than indicate anything about technology. That's four words, you've got lots of opportunity to tell me what exactly this does, but nope, Microsoft at the front tells me this is from an era when the Windows group wasn't ascendant at Microsoft, in this case the recent era. Azure tells me this is from Microsoft's "cloud" era starting in about 2010 (but the early part of that is "Windows Azure"). Active though is from an earlier incarnation, it's a turn of the century idea. Huh. "Microsoft Core Directory 365" would tell me this was a newer product, maybe from the last 3-5 years or so, "Windows Directory.NET" is from maybe 2005, while "Windows Directory X" would most likely be a late-1990s product and plain "Microsoft Directory" suggests maybe it's from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Notice how if you don't know that Microsoft names their products based on chronology you might assume Azure Active Directory is Active Directory but in Azure? Big mistake. Thinking that way can cost you a lot of time or money.
    - pram 5y ago
      Hilarious. I had no idea Azure AD wasn’t actually AD, but actually uhh, more like OneLogin? lol
dustintrex 5y ago
Oracle is floundering: their databases are no longer competitive and nobody uses their cloud voluntarily (except perhaps the free tier). The only reason they're still around is that they intentionally make it very difficult to migrate off.
InvaderFizz 5y ago
I've had the displeasure of working on a lot of OCI migrations from AWS over the past few months. Unless your needs are very basic (compute, network, storage), you are going to hit a lot of sharp edges and managing your own solutions. Our products are built around Postgres/Elastic as the backend. On AWS we make heavy use of EKS, ALB, S3, CloudFront, managed Elasticsearch, Postgres RDS, managed Redis, etc. On Oracle, we have to build and manage our own Postgres, Redis, Elastic, etc. The only real managed solution Oracle has is Kubernetes, which apparently isn't even roadmapped to automatically cull nodes that enter into a Not Ready state. I was generally OK with the Oracle migrations. I understand them from the money perspective why the executive decision was made. The general uselessness of Oracle support when things do go wrong is going to bite us hard. I nearly lost my shit last week when I had to explain how their own yum repositories work to their support rep on the Zoom call. TL;DR, whenever they come under heavy load from, say, three VMs in the same VCN all installing the same package set at the same time as part of an Ansible playbook, their yum/identity servers start throttling connections and handing out 401 errors. In the end I just put a retry loop on the yum portion of the playbooks, they eventually get enough of the RPMs. I spent 10 hours last Saturday leading the troubleshooting effort with their network team for what I quickly identified as a region wide issue between OCI Mumbai and AWS us-east-1. There was a router somewhere in the path between the two data centers that was just dropping packets when the MTU needed to exceed 1478. It wasn't Oracle's fault, per se, but the process of getting their team to recognize and understand the issue was frustrating. I needed to get them to understand it so that they could then file a complaint upstream. BTW, if last Saturday your assets in AP-Mumbai-1 went dark on DataDog or you were unable to pull containers from Docker Hub for about 15 hours, this is why. I don't know, maybe we're too small to get useful support, we're only spending $200k/month on OCI.

It's somewhat surprising that Oracle isn't even mentioned in the article.

by powera 5y ago

It's somewhat surprising that Oracle isn't even mentioned in the article.

It's not terribly surprising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 Oracle is rich for shrewd business arrangements. I'm not sure its considered a good company technically?

tux3 5y ago
With only very little snark, I'm more than happy to nominate many Microsoft products for the same category of top down B2B sales that Oracle occupies. You don't chose to use MS Teams. Someone sells it to your employees. On a technical level, Teams technically works.. some of the time. No one picked Azure because they have better tech. You pick Azure either for business reasons, or because they exclusively offer something you need. I have encountered more bugs, incorrect documentation, and operations mysteriously hanging for 20 minutes in a couple weeks of Azure usage than in years of GCP and AWS use. It is not even close. And I will refrain, with great effort, from speaking about the confused inconsistent mess that is Azure Active Directory.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Microsoft Azure Active Directory is a great example of Microsoft's habit of using buzzwords to indicate chronology rather than indicate anything about technology. That's four words, you've got lots of opportunity to tell me what exactly this does, but nope, Microsoft at the front tells me this is from an era when the Windows group wasn't ascendant at Microsoft, in this case the recent era. Azure tells me this is from Microsoft's "cloud" era starting in about 2010 (but the early part of that is "Windows Azure"). Active though is from an earlier incarnation, it's a turn of the century idea. Huh. "Microsoft Core Directory 365" would tell me this was a newer product, maybe from the last 3-5 years or so, "Windows Directory.NET" is from maybe 2005, while "Windows Directory X" would most likely be a late-1990s product and plain "Microsoft Directory" suggests maybe it's from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Notice how if you don't know that Microsoft names their products based on chronology you might assume Azure Active Directory is Active Directory but in Azure? Big mistake. Thinking that way can cost you a lot of time or money.
  - pram 5y ago
    Hilarious. I had no idea Azure AD wasn’t actually AD, but actually uhh, more like OneLogin? lol

dustintrex 5y ago

Oracle is floundering: their databases are no longer competitive and nobody uses their cloud voluntarily (except perhaps the free tier). The only reason they're still around is that they intentionally make it very difficult to migrate off.

InvaderFizz 5y ago

I've had the displeasure of working on a lot of OCI migrations from AWS over the past few months. Unless your needs are very basic (compute, network, storage), you are going to hit a lot of sharp edges and managing your own solutions. Our products are built around Postgres/Elastic as the backend. On AWS we make heavy use of EKS, ALB, S3, CloudFront, managed Elasticsearch, Postgres RDS, managed Redis, etc. On Oracle, we have to build and manage our own Postgres, Redis, Elastic, etc. The only real managed solution Oracle has is Kubernetes, which apparently isn't even roadmapped to automatically cull nodes that enter into a Not Ready state. I was generally OK with the Oracle migrations. I understand them from the money perspective why the executive decision was made. The general uselessness of Oracle support when things do go wrong is going to bite us hard. I nearly lost my shit last week when I had to explain how their own yum repositories work to their support rep on the Zoom call. TL;DR, whenever they come under heavy load from, say, three VMs in the same VCN all installing the same package set at the same time as part of an Ansible playbook, their yum/identity servers start throttling connections and handing out 401 errors. In the end I just put a retry loop on the yum portion of the playbooks, they eventually get enough of the RPMs. I spent 10 hours last Saturday leading the troubleshooting effort with their network team for what I quickly identified as a region wide issue between OCI Mumbai and AWS us-east-1. There was a router somewhere in the path between the two data centers that was just dropping packets when the MTU needed to exceed 1478. It wasn't Oracle's fault, per se, but the process of getting their team to recognize and understand the issue was frustrating. I needed to get them to understand it so that they could then file a complaint upstream. BTW, if last Saturday your assets in AP-Mumbai-1 went dark on DataDog or you were unable to pull containers from Docker Hub for about 15 hours, this is why. I don't know, maybe we're too small to get useful support, we're only spending $200k/month on OCI.