"..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."
> Ellison showed off a new Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server offering that will provide developers with 36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM, and 28.8TB of SSD storage.
AWS isn't merely about the compute. EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem of infrastructure services that has been built out by amazon over the past 10 years. If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced.
I'm happy that there's more competition but Oracle's offering seems more like empty words rather than concrete competition.
Maybe they'll now stop pouring resources into the Google lawsuit and actually pursue building new useful products.
Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.
Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service.
So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive.
It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons.
I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere.
There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.
If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened.
I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers:
- List Prices are cheaper [-1]
- Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0]
- Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1]
- Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2]
- Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing
- VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3]
In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4]
> If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them?
They have a huge suite of offerings, good reputation, huge amount of third party tooling, and the services themselves are somewhat sticky.
By that I mean, I could probably switch over to your cheaper cloud service. It would mean having my engineers go through and build stuff to fill in the gaps or transition away from things that are very AWS specific.
Or I could just pay a bit more money and keep developing features as AWS isn't too expensive and does what I need.
I agree that this makes sense for a lot of people. E.g. I have clients that I recommend use AWS simply because hosting is a small cost item for them and it isn't worth their effort to optimise it for cost (at least not until they grow huge) vs. spending effort elsewhere.
Moving to cheaper services quickly becomes a big deal for people with low margins and high infrastructure costs, though, where moving to cheaper infrastructure can make the difference between being able to match competitors on price or not.
The key is to understand your hosting needs well enough to know whether or not you can afford to build a dependency on AWS specific services.
What do you mean why is nobody doing that? Lots of providers are doing that. Almost the only providers in the same price league as AWS are Google Cloud, Azure and Rackspace. All of them appear to assume (rightly so, judging by peoples reaction) that they can keep their margins high on the basis of brand name recognition and specialist features, and none of them seem interested in rocking the boat.
They will drop their publicly listed prices once smaller customers gets comfortable enough with cloud services to start seriously shopping around, not before. Larger customers will already negotiate (e.g. I know of one AWS customer with ~75% discount over the listed prices)
> The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened.
AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculously expensive for bandwidth.
> I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
I do the datacenter thing every day, and I also do AWS and other cloud providers every day, and when I move customers to dedicated hosting they typically cut their total infrastructure costs to 1/2 or 1/3 vs AWS costs after considering reserved instances and maintenance costs. For many of them, if they were large enough to get serious attention from Amazon they might have been able to negotiate deals that'd make it cost effective to stay, but I've also had more extreme examples, like a customer that cut their hosting cost to 1/10th.
The agility argument doesn't fly with me - I manage multiple systems that are hybrid mixes of dedicated predictable loads on self-owned or leased hardware, coupled with cloud resources that are "tied in" via VPNs as needed.
With well designed systems, the very availability of cloud makes dedicated hosting cheaper even if you never or rarely use it: Where we before often had to plan for 50% to 100% overcapacity on dedicated hardware to handle spikes (and might still have to just accept that some spikes would slow things down), we can now plan on almost no overcapacity and spin up on-demand instances to take spikes (we need only sufficient overcapacity to react and for additional capacity to come online), or even to shave off the top peaks of daily traffic.
> What do you mean why is nobody doing that? Lots of providers are doing that.
And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents.
> AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculously expensive for bandwidth.
But that bandwidth is usually capped in speed and is dedicated to only that instance. No provider like this can handle all of their clients using 80% of their allotted bandwidth. AWS's bandwidth may be expensive, but it is as elastic as you can get and you are never over-provisioning. It's also negotiable just like anything else.
> but I've also had more extreme examples, like a customer that cut their hosting cost to 1/10th.
I'd be interested to hear particulars of this. Obviously it is your edge case, but I find it hard to believe that somebody can cut their costs that much unless they were way over-provisioned on AWS or they are not really counting all of the costs. I have never seen a DC that didn't have more management overhead to run than a full cloud offering.
> And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents.
I don't think that's an accurate statement. Google Cloud and Azure have broad offerings, and in many cases eclipse AWS (ex: Big Data, ML, pricing, BI, NoSQL, Hadoop/Spark, containers, and even things like load balancers and persistent storage).
I think he meant services other than the big one. In that case he's right. But the point is most people aren't using those services - they use AWS as a glorified dumb dedicated hosting provider. And that's exactly the wrong way to use it.
> And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents.
And that's why it is sometimes worthwhile using AWS. But most people don't use any of the advanced features of AWS.
> But that bandwidth is usually capped in speed and is dedicated to only that instance. No provider like this can handle all of their clients using 80% of their allotted bandwidth
You are jumping to conclusions that I'm only talking about "all inclusive" server rental deals. That's not the case.
You can buy bandwidth at a committed information rate charged based on a 5 minute 95th percentile billing which will typically end up at ~10% of AWS cost with ease unless you have extremely high/lasting spikes in a vast number of data centres from a large number of providers.
Much less if you take advantage of peering or buy limited transit (e.g. if you're in the UK, and most of your traffic is within the UK, you can cut your cost drastically once you reach any kind of volume by getting peering agreements in place for most of your UK bandwidth use, pay a low cost for Europe-only transit, and pay a higher cost for a much lower amount of worldwide transit; it has a management overhead so it doesn't pay until your bandwidth bill starts growing, which is why most people will start off by taking "only" straight unrestricted transit at a higher cost per Mbps/Gbps)
You can also pay per GB/TB and end up paying far less than AWS.
E.g. at Hetzner, you pay per TB over a minimum limit, just like with AWS. For Hetzner, the current overage rate is €1.17 per TB. I have no reason to assume that they're losing on money on that - they'be be able to hand most of that off via peering agreements.
> I'd be interested to hear particulars of this. Obviously it is your edge case, but I find it hard to believe that somebody can cut their costs that much unless they were way over-provisioned on AWS or they are not really counting all of the costs. I have never seen a DC that didn't have more management overhead to run than a full cloud offering.
They moved EC2 instances to Hetzner instances of roughly same speed. That's all there was too it - Hetzner server prices are low, and their bandwidth prices are as mentioned about €1.17 per TB above a limit per instance that's large enough that they've yet to exceed them, and that's the thing that's making the biggest difference (I've actually in the past cut peoples AWS bills by putting boxes at Hetzner and elsewhere purely as caches in front of their AWS setups because of the huge bandwidth differential - for people who spend much on bandwidth, it can pay for the extra servers many times over)
My experience is that we had no problems meeting similar bandwidth levels per machine as they did at AWS. Management is roughly the same complexity. They ended up using "bare metal" dedicated servers (Hetzner also offers VPSs) so they have access to IPMI to manage reboots etc. as necessary, and Hetzners rescue system lets them reimage the servers at will, so after investing a few k on scripting server installs it's as automated as their AWS setup was. They pay a very minimal extra overhead in an encrypted VPN between instances (and with current setup would pay for bandwidth for that if they exceed the included bandwidth allotment), though you can avoid this with some extra complexity (you can pay Hetzner some small fee and get servers wired up to a private network).
The cost difference includes the per-hour costs paid to keep either service running - the latter setup has actually cost them less in time spent managing it.
Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.
Exactly. The idea that Oracle can catch up based on pricing & machine specs ("36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM") is really naive.
My current position on this is that IaaS is pretty much over. Aliyun & AWS seem like they're going to dominate. Microsoft & Google & others fight for the rest. Maybe, just maybe, Oracle will catch up with the 'small' players, but I doubt Microsoft++ or Google will be sitting on their hands wondering how much DRAM Oracle is going to wow us all with next.
Big in China, and China is big... Believe they are 4th largest overall at the moment but who can keep up with the ever changing league tables? I am planning to kick the tyres on them this weekend actually.
I tried their DBaaS offering about 18 months ago. The setup / "control panel" is laughable compared to even the most pedestrian of AWS service offerings. It worked, but it was not a user interface that inspired much confidence. Not sure if they had a CLI to even try instead.
Sure, but having a compelling story about compute and having a massive advantage in knowledge of how to sell to the exact kinds of enterprises that haven't already made their big transition to the cloud yet isn't a bad combination to have if you want to establish a nice firm place in cloud. from which you can expand and develop what you need to bite off other parts of the market.
They aren't going to follow the same path as AWS, both because they aren't, as a corporation, oriented toward that path and because the low-hanging fruit you can pick up along that path has already been picked up by AWS.
No, I think Oracle is targeting a different market because to them it is a low hanging fruit.
AWS got a lot of startups and tech savvy companies (like Netflix). If I were Oracle I would target existing customers, who generally are not the tech savvy darlings (think Procter & Gamble, health companies, food companies, banks...) who can now tell their board their on-site Oracle licences have been moved to the cloud.
It's a market Oracle is uniquely qualified to pursue because they already have the sales operation and contacts in place. Now whether they are able to execute is why we are eating the popcorn and watching. The inside sales model is the 20th century sales model after all.
...and here is how that is going to play out. We're a large public sector customer. As part of our last ELA renewal (which was an effing effing nightmare over vmware licensing) we got this crapload of Oracle cloud products that we didn't really want or need, database cloud, process cloud, integration cloud, on and on. I think there must have been a mandate from Mark Hurd to the effect that "There will be cloud products on EVERY deal." So now our rep is trying to get us to do POC's to move apps onto the cloud stuff. I bet other customers can tell similar stories. And so Oracle can show growth in their cloud business...
In regards to VMware licensing, allow me to expound upon a situation faced by a recent customer.
Oracle allows licensing on VMware on a hypervisor level. When VMware allowed you to vMotion between hosts in a vSphere HA cluster, Oracle would require that you license all the hosts in the cluster because the Oracle VMs might land on any of those hosts in a failover situation. When cross-cluster vMotion came with 5.1, the customer was told that they must license every host attached to that vCenter instance, forcing the customer to purchase and implement another vCenter strictly for Oracle.
And now, with vSphere 6, comes cross-vCenter vMotion. You can guess where that conversation with Oracle went. Customer bought an Oracle Enterprise license, which is presumably what the sales rep had in mind the whole time.
>Sure, but having a compelling story about compute and having a massive advantage in knowledge of how to sell to the exact kinds of enterprises that haven't already made their big transition to the cloud yet isn't a bad combination to have if you want to establish a nice firm place in cloud. from which you can expand and develop what you need to bite off other parts of the market.
You mean what IBM is doing/has done? Oracle doesn't know how to sell to those people, it knows how to EXTORT those people. Most people I know hate Oracle with a passion as a business, and only continue to do business with them out of obligation.
> If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced.
Don't rule out the power of acquisitions (see: Firebase/Google, Parse/Facebook). Word on the street is that they're also throwing silly mounds of cash at cloud talent.
I recently joined this team from Azure. Lots of senior AWS and Joyent folks here as well. Send me a mail at joe dot levy at oracle dot com and I can connect you with the right folks. Same goes for anyone else interested!
Based on this article alone, it sounds like Oracle is gunning for lift-and-shift of existing solutions into this bare-metal "cloud", positioning themselves more as an MSP than a true cloud provider. Is my read wrong here?
> Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with, etc...), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.
Oracle is not going to win, not matter what they do. Oracle is built on selling costly products and services versus operating in a low margin environment.
1.) Amazon has a much higher bar for hiring talent, than Oracle does.
2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products.
3.) Amazon shareholders are already use to the company not being profitable, where as Oracle shareholders are not.
My favorite memory from a former employer was eavesdropping on a call between our CIO and our Oracle representative. Oracle had told us we only needed to pay for production environments. Then, during a license audit, they claimed never to have said that and wanted to charge for all environments.
I never got to hear the Oracle rep's side of the phone conversation, but everyone within 50 feet of the CIO's office got to hear his.
"Fine! You want to fuck me on these licenses! Go right ahead! And then I'll turn around and fuck you by throwing you out of our datacenter!"
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 software vs open source. Is there absolutely no alternative?
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).
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.
This sounds like you're talking about abstracting and decoupling components. Building systems to accommodate heterogeneous environments early is akin to starting a project with microservices instead of a monolith - it's overscoping probably. Furthermore, it's fallacious to say that all software should fit some new standards of environments when there's no scenario for it all (the COBOL code that's for accounting doesn't have anything to do with the products your company sells probably).
This then raises issues of compatibility with your customer's environments. The configuration matrix that you'd need to test is tedious (read: costly) in traditional software releases compared to SaaS where you're free to make a lot of decisions independent of your customer and not everything can be automated (anyone that's deployed automated tests against TN3270 terminals with a lukewarm IQ QA department is right to challenge this). Then there's longevity. What happens when your biggest paying customer wants you to stay on IE 8 until 2025 (not an exaggeration)? Want to create yet another customer-specific branch? Eventually you wind up needing a test environment that matches exactly what that customer has and paying contractors to maintain that dead-end tech stack and doing that for every customer. That is quite common and also quite costly but not needing much talent, so the washed up maintenance engineers go here at less than mediocre compensation to cut costs. That's zombie software for you - the soul and spirit of engineers are gone and its corpse is animated by money by a cruel master that cares little for its past life.
It's not so much that the CIO/CTO wants the ability to call up a vendor, or have his employees call up a vendor for support. What a CIO/CTO wants is the ability to tell his CEO that "Yeah, we're having a problem with our database, but it's Oracle so we're good. I'm kicking the vendor's ass, but he's going to make things right on our next renewal." It's all about plausible deniability, and goes back to the days of "Nobody got fired for buying IBM."
> 2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products.
They may be used to being frugal, but that is not at all reflected in AWS pricing, which is ridiculously high across the board.
Operating infrastructure costs what it costs. Amazon are paying the same per Watt of electricity as anyone else. They are paying the same per sq foot of DC. They are famous for lowballing salaries but they do need to remain in in the ballpark at least. I don't mean this as a criticism necessarily but it is what it is and folks need to understand it.
Operating infrastructure costs what it costs, and it is a tiny fraction of what Amazon prices it at.
I make a lot of my income cutting peoples infrastructure costs by optimising their setups, and a lot of it involves moving people off AWS (I also move people onto AWS when they have needs that are actually best met there - there are lots of AWS services I love, but they are expensive) to save money. I can generally price my services at a few months worth of their savings.
Competing with AWS on price isn't the hard part. The challenge is the amount of people that either don't care, or think that AWS is cheap without having done realistic comparisons.
But for Oracle, those are exactly the type of customers they have built their entire business around selling to.
Interesting observation, though it raises the obvious responses:
1. What's constraining AWS's growth capacity? Isn't it simply a matter of stamping out AZs and DCs?
2. Why would Amazone create a pricing structure which encourages new entrants into the field? Contrast local retail in which defunct firms continue to sit on, and extend, real-estate leases, strictly to prevent other companies from growing into the market they've abandoned. See Dominicks / Anderson grocery stores in the Chicago area, in which seventy-two stores are being leased, at a cost of ~$1m/year, each, to prevent competitors from occupying the space:
(This works in part because rent is only a small part of the operational cost of a grocery store: electric power, labour, maintenance, and of course, groceries, are required if you're actually utilising the space.)
> Why would Amazone create a pricing structure which encourages new entrants into the field?
Because the primary entrant threats were not going to be dissuaded by low price competition. Specifically Microsoft and Google. Both are hyper cash and income rich and under no circumstances did they want to cede the cloud computing universe to Amazon. Fundamentally it's the exact same reason AWS stopped trying to compete so intensely on price cuts quite a while back now.
Put another way, if you're going up against Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle - speaking hypothetically it's better to own 1/3 of the market and print significant operating income, than to own 1/2 of the market and barely make money. That operating income is responsible for roughly doubling the value of Amazon's share price (the stock took off like a rocket after it became clear AWS was going to be a cash-cow).
It's an interesting question. In my experience people often have this idea that AWS can scale infinitely, and get shocked when they are faced with the AWS limits ("but I thought we could just spin up 200 instances, what do you mean we have to ask them to increase limits?"), and I've actually had errors from the EC2 api telling us there were no instances of a given instance type available (one of the larger/more unusual instance types, in one of the smaller regions).
But their margins should be large enough, and have been for so many years, that they should have been able to take that into account and adjust expansion accordingly.
I'm more inclined to think that they have simply decided to milk it while they can. I rarely meet people who have any clue what their infrastructure choices actually cost them and what they would pay elsewhere, and I regularly have conversations about how much people believe they'd save by moving to/from provider X where it transpires that said person hasn't even tried costing it out but are certain they'll save money. I also regularly talk to IT departments that have no kind of budget or forecasting in place for their hosting requirements. The state of budgeting for server infrastructure is simply shocking. In that kind of environment, if you price based on actual cost, rather than based on whether or not people believe you're expensive, you're leaving money on the table.
On 3) have you looked at the profitability of AWS? It's ridiculously profitable. I just checked their latest 10K, and I see for 2015 their total AWS numbers were $1.9B operating income on $7.9B revenue with 70% year over year revenue growth.
I would not be surprised if the Oracle offerings turn out to be better than EC2
Oracle has been poaching the core EC2 team from Amazon for years now, in Seattle there are farewell parties every week for another person leaving EC2 to work at Oracle
I would be. Good engineers can only make a good product if the management chain creates an environment for them to do it. Theres also a base level of hatred (lets not pretend its a loved company) oracle has to overcome to get people to use new products as well.
Does this include network-layer personnel? Oracle is talking big about their compute, but it's useless without a robust and dynamic network infrastructure. Since storage fabrics are also networks today, a solid infrastructure is doubly-important, yet some data centers and MSPs seem to struggle with this core competency.
* Since they seem to be targeting a hybrid approach, how flexible will they be at building and customizing network tunnels to multiple data centers and branch offices?
* Will they allow you to host webservers there, or will you have to figure out how to network to another data center - and will it run Java, or can you get Apache or Docker? IIS with License Mobility?
* What will they do about human error creating routing loops or erroneous BGP broadcasts, when they expand or perform maintenance?
* How will they mitigate both external DDoS and compromised machine attacks from inside?
Running a multi-data center MSP is no easy feat. It will be interesting to see what solutions are developed by Oracle's offering to the above problems.
Yes. I used to work at a major networking company in Seattle, and Oracle has recruited many good people from there, and is paying them nose-ruining salaries. I think their cloud may have many problems, but I doubt networking infrastructure will be one of them.
I'm surprised people still aren't aware of the massive talent transfer from AWS to Oracle.
This is much larger than just compute. A constant stream of principles and SDE3s have been moving for well over a year. Most of the senior engineers on my team have moved with 60% raises. I'm just waiting for their non-competes to expire.
On one level this is just typical bluster. "Oracle is going to launch a phone, so you might as well get used to it, 2015 was Apple's last profitable year." On another, why is such bluster typical? These people aren't stupid, I assume, so why even try such implausibly optimistic announcements?
Does hubris lead to sales if you have Oracle-like customers?
Oracle has one the most aggressive salesforces, they could sell combs to bald men. As long as they convince the non technical CXO teams thats all they need.
The gotcha in all of this is that the brutal competition in the cloud means that there isn't the profit margin to pay for all of this glitz anymore in the business.
Granted. It's just that to my ears, Larry Ellison's announcement scores the wrong check marks:
bluster: check
hubris: check
realism: nope
I would have expected that someone who takes marketing very, very seriously tries to sound realistic, not overoptimistic or full of that which makes plants grow.
Saying "oracle's database rocks" and asking for a stiff price has a certain touch of realism. I can see how a good salesforce can do that with success. My question is along the lines of: Can a good salesforce use bluster as a main tool to sell something shitty, such as oracle's IaaS offering? How does that sales process work?
Enterprise sales is a menagerie of sharks. Some are Makos, some are threshers, but the best are Tiger and Great White. We were planning a forklift upgrade of our enterprise backup system; a relatively boring exercise. The team responsible for coming up with a recommendation evaluated the four major candidates, made a proposal, and quickly watched the most expensive and least suitable candidate dominate their rivals. The other team stood no chance. The team tried to influence the purchase with the decisionmakers, but it fell on deaf ears. The tech wasn't very impressive, but the sales team made Alec Baldwin in GlenGarry, Glen Ross look like an amateur.
Knowing what we do about Oracle's licensing practices and how their sales people are basically just loan sharks that will take your kneecaps out if you don't pay their extortion fees, why would you ever want to put your entire operation in their hands? I would assume they'd have no issue cutting you off from your entire infrastructure at the drop of a hat if there was a billing dispute.
Lets not act like the other vendors in the database arena are cherubim. MS, IBM, Oracle, NetApp, EMC, all perform audits, and try to squeeze the most out of large enterprises. They see large companies just like casinos; as whales. And part of that is because it's a lot easier to just buy the big packages than try to roll postgres or mysql into a stack built up on other OTS software.
For example, I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle and Websphere, my hands are tied.
Oracle is smoking some dang strong weed if they honestly think they can compete with AWS. AWS does so well because they have a history of opening their platforms up, Oracle does the exact opposite
Yes and no. AWS has bet on cloud-means-public-cloud. Azure and Oracle are betting on hybrid: they'll sell you a private cloud that sits in your own DC that can interoperate seamlessly with their public cloud. AWS is a no-brainer if you're a greenfield, but the jury's still out on brownfield.
Which also makes it more viable for government contracts.
This is like looking at any other marketshare debate. Amazon/Google may win the majority of users, but MS and Oracle are going to get the ones with deep pockets. They don't need me and my piddly weekend project, or most startups. They'll make a mint off a handful of lucrative government contracts, and contracts with the defense contractors that go Oracle because the gov't has pushed it.
You, sir, know what you're talking about. The jury is definitely out on brownfield and so far Amazon doesn't seem interested in that space. Which means there's a helluva lot of market left up for grabs.
To be honest, working with Oracle tech would be reason enough for me to quit my job and work elsewhere. We've now witnessed decades of Oracle's business practices and I really wouldn't bother with any of it at this point. Just using their junkware helps them thrive by turning employers into enablers.
A lot of people have made comments on the tech. But there's another issue here: trust. How many people are going to be willing to trust Oracle with their data? They don't exactly have the best reputation, and they don't have the best track record either. And what they did to Solaris just makes it worse.
Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as he says in any case.
That is exactly what I was thinking. Oracle can do pretty decent stuff with tech as far as I have seen, but their actual direction and choices seems to embody the crassly-disgusting money squeeze corporation so much that I really don't want to do business with them. I mean, they put crapware in the consumer JRE installer. How many dollars did they get for that, versus how much negative feeling from that alone? This seems like a corporation who owns their terrible reputation, and says, "who cares? we're still rich."
there is no attempt to disguise anything - Oracle is your typical stock evil corp, full package. they are pretty damn consistent about it too. they have couple of decent products that they evolve as little as necessary to maintain position, but everything else about them is a big no-no.
That actually is true. Many forget that Sun wasn't far behind Oracle in the size of its hatedom for a while. We're only nice to them now because 1) speak no ill of the dead, (2 ZFS, and other technical innovations 3) because HN is full of ex-Sun employees, and 4) because we also have the odd Solaris fanboy or two, and speaking ill of Solaris or Sun is likely to get you into a holy war second only to the one you'd get for decrying the Lispm.
I just got the page about this Sev-2 Sun Microsystems comment on HN, and I am working this ticket. If you haven't already, please see our docs on Why Sun Microsystems Failed[1]. If I don't hear back from you, I will mark this ticket as closed. Thank you for only remembering Sun Microsystems with kindness, and have a great day!
Not bad, Bryan. And some interesting history, too.
Don't get me wrong, Sun was a great company, but like all companies, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. You've said as much yourself before.
I wished to point out that there was a time that Sun wasn't as beloved, and to indicate some of the reasons that we don't talk about some of Sun's less savory actions so much on HN.
If, as an ex-Sun employee, you find this insulting (and the trace elements of sarcasm indicate that this may be so), than I will inform you that it certainly wasn't meant to be so, although I now see why it may come off that way.
Thank you for responding to my ticket, and have a great day!
Scott McNeally was great fun. Jonathan Schwartz not that much. The confusion about wether it was a hardware company or a software one drove it into the ground. Worse... Right into Oracle.
Forget data, I wouldn't want to do business with them period. Outside of some stories about investment banks I've never heard of any other company so openly out to screw their customers.
Not that I'm defending Oracle, but what did they do with Solaris to make you think they aren't trustworthy with user data? It sounds like you're conflating two criticisms and equating "generally shitty company" with "untrustworthy company". Oracle DBs are pretty ubiquitous and I don't think I've heard privacy complaints leveled at them. Hell, even Amazon uses Oracle DBs pretty extensively internally.
Here's the thing: If that's the sort of business we're dealing with, which will sell out anything for an opportunistic buck, and you're now paying them monthly for data/compute, do you think they won't take advantage of that?
Oracle may be evil, but they aren't dumb. A lot of their revenue comes from businesses which have much stricter requirements around data privacy than individuals.
...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.
That depends: if you feel paying $47,000 per license for an Oracle database is overpriced, considering it's pretty much the only database which actually works and can withstand the kind of abuse large customers dish out at it, then I guess it's overpriced. I happen to think it's a bargain and a half, and wouldn't mind paying for it in the least. I know exactly what I'd be getting, and what that baby can do. And for $47,000, it can do so much in one package that other databases better hide. The only other database which can measure up against Oracle is Vertica, which is surprise! surprise! another commercial product (at $150,000, Vertica is much more expensive, but it's also awesome). PostgreSQL comes in a distant third, and for the users of the enormous and completely exotic, there's Teradata. And with the exception of PostgreSQL, which still has long way to go with respect to synchronous multimaster replication, all these other databases cost so much that it's enough to make one's head spin. So Oracle is actually the cheapest.
Oracle corporation actually made an industry out of making sure customers' data is protected. That's one of the reasons why Oracle database sells, and why it pretty much killed or ate all other competition in the relational database management system space. Just take a look at the encryption features and PKI / SmartCard support in the database, and I think we're done here.
A lot of Fortune 100 companies trust Oracle substantially more than Amazon due to Oracle being a lot more of a traditional enterprise software company while more concerns early in AWS history were around whether Amazon could navigate the usual enterprise customer's needs around compliance, federation, and security. That's been quite clearly answered now though.
You must not work in Fortune 500 IT. Dear God how they love to shovel money at Larry Ellison. Trust? Let me tell you about the CIO's who distrust any data storage that ISN'T Oracle.
For those Fortune 500 companies who've made the shift to cloud services Amazon currently fills the role that Oracle does in data storage. I'm sure there's plenty of Fortune 500 CIOs who are still hesitant to embrace the cloud in general, but If there's a CIO out there who's moving some services to the cloud going with Oracle over Amazon just because its Oracle then they're out of their element.
Even my most progressive we-want-to-be-like-Silicon-Valley clients still haven't moved everything to the cloud. Legacy is hard. Many many critical apps will continue to use Oracle until they are eventually sunset in a decade. Oracle is going to have a nice long ride into said sunset.
They may be gunning for AWS, azure, etc publicly but I'd bet the main consumers of this service will be existing Oracle ERP (and other business apps) customers. They're already just fine with paying a fortune and having an iaas backing gives Oracle another way to squeeze a bit more out. We already run your erp in Oracle's iaas, you should bring your other applications up as well, and so on.
Evil empire comments aside more cloud infrastructure competition is good for us all.
> IDC program director Al Hilwa wrote in an email that he had little doubt Oracle would be a major force in the cloud, and is building momentum.
The quote they use doesn't sound like he has "little doubt"
> "In terms of market leadership, I think Oracle will have to produce much faster growth rates to really get ahead of Amazon or even Microsoft in IaaS, and analysts will be watching its spend on data-centers to track this," he said.
AWS has many advantages over competitors and one prominent one that stands out the most is Lambda platform. Once customers are tied in to it (very symbiotic code) they would prefer not to move to similar offerings by Oracle or another company unless the cost savings are astronomical enough to motivate otherwise.
At least Oracle has the Fortune 500 FUD going for them. But, to think that they can easily beat an entrenched incumbent like AWS is a little much. I mean even Google, with their positive brand, hordes of cash, and guerrilla ad campaign (on this site and others) can barely make a dent.
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.
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.
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
How I read this: "we will double down on license audits, if we found you breaching our contract we will pardon you if you move to our jail or face the fines"
If you want to beat AWS fight them on data transfer pricing. $90 per TB is the reason many people choose budget clouds or dedicated hardware. Amazon's own pricing reveals how much markup they have when they drop to $50 per TB publicly for high volume and probably $20 per TB for "Contact Us"-level volume.
In addition to the cheap 2 Xeon socket configuration, I would love to see Oracle offering fault-tolerant, mainframe reliability level, infrastructure. Also, "SPARC big iron as a service"...
165 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadBasically, this is a new product from a new team comprised of a bunch of ex-Amazon engineers in Seattle, among others.
"..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.
http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hires-nebula-employees...
The naming was always confusing because both companies were based within a mile of each other, never mind the product overlap.
AWS isn't merely about the compute. EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem of infrastructure services that has been built out by amazon over the past 10 years. If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced.
I'm happy that there's more competition but Oracle's offering seems more like empty words rather than concrete competition.
Maybe they'll now stop pouring resources into the Google lawsuit and actually pursue building new useful products.
So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive.
It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.
I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere.
There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.
I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
- List Prices are cheaper [-1]
- Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0]
- Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1]
- Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2]
- Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing
- VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3]
In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4]
[-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
[0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use
[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible
[2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/
[3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou...
[4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c...
(disc: work @ Google Cloud)
They have a huge suite of offerings, good reputation, huge amount of third party tooling, and the services themselves are somewhat sticky.
By that I mean, I could probably switch over to your cheaper cloud service. It would mean having my engineers go through and build stuff to fill in the gaps or transition away from things that are very AWS specific.
Or I could just pay a bit more money and keep developing features as AWS isn't too expensive and does what I need.
Moving to cheaper services quickly becomes a big deal for people with low margins and high infrastructure costs, though, where moving to cheaper infrastructure can make the difference between being able to match competitors on price or not.
The key is to understand your hosting needs well enough to know whether or not you can afford to build a dependency on AWS specific services.
They will drop their publicly listed prices once smaller customers gets comfortable enough with cloud services to start seriously shopping around, not before. Larger customers will already negotiate (e.g. I know of one AWS customer with ~75% discount over the listed prices)
> The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened.
AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculously expensive for bandwidth.
> I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
I do the datacenter thing every day, and I also do AWS and other cloud providers every day, and when I move customers to dedicated hosting they typically cut their total infrastructure costs to 1/2 or 1/3 vs AWS costs after considering reserved instances and maintenance costs. For many of them, if they were large enough to get serious attention from Amazon they might have been able to negotiate deals that'd make it cost effective to stay, but I've also had more extreme examples, like a customer that cut their hosting cost to 1/10th.
The agility argument doesn't fly with me - I manage multiple systems that are hybrid mixes of dedicated predictable loads on self-owned or leased hardware, coupled with cloud resources that are "tied in" via VPNs as needed.
With well designed systems, the very availability of cloud makes dedicated hosting cheaper even if you never or rarely use it: Where we before often had to plan for 50% to 100% overcapacity on dedicated hardware to handle spikes (and might still have to just accept that some spikes would slow things down), we can now plan on almost no overcapacity and spin up on-demand instances to take spikes (we need only sufficient overcapacity to react and for additional capacity to come online), or even to shave off the top peaks of daily traffic.
And not a single one of them has anything close to the wide and growing offering that AWS presents.
> AWS bandwidth pricing is 5x-50x higher than the providers I usually use. E.g. for the cost of 1TB of transfer at AWS you can rent a server for a month + multiple TB of transfer elsewhere. Cutting it in half would still leave them ridiculously expensive for bandwidth.
But that bandwidth is usually capped in speed and is dedicated to only that instance. No provider like this can handle all of their clients using 80% of their allotted bandwidth. AWS's bandwidth may be expensive, but it is as elastic as you can get and you are never over-provisioning. It's also negotiable just like anything else.
> but I've also had more extreme examples, like a customer that cut their hosting cost to 1/10th.
I'd be interested to hear particulars of this. Obviously it is your edge case, but I find it hard to believe that somebody can cut their costs that much unless they were way over-provisioned on AWS or they are not really counting all of the costs. I have never seen a DC that didn't have more management overhead to run than a full cloud offering.
I don't think that's an accurate statement. Google Cloud and Azure have broad offerings, and in many cases eclipse AWS (ex: Big Data, ML, pricing, BI, NoSQL, Hadoop/Spark, containers, and even things like load balancers and persistent storage).
And that's why it is sometimes worthwhile using AWS. But most people don't use any of the advanced features of AWS.
> But that bandwidth is usually capped in speed and is dedicated to only that instance. No provider like this can handle all of their clients using 80% of their allotted bandwidth
You are jumping to conclusions that I'm only talking about "all inclusive" server rental deals. That's not the case.
You can buy bandwidth at a committed information rate charged based on a 5 minute 95th percentile billing which will typically end up at ~10% of AWS cost with ease unless you have extremely high/lasting spikes in a vast number of data centres from a large number of providers.
Much less if you take advantage of peering or buy limited transit (e.g. if you're in the UK, and most of your traffic is within the UK, you can cut your cost drastically once you reach any kind of volume by getting peering agreements in place for most of your UK bandwidth use, pay a low cost for Europe-only transit, and pay a higher cost for a much lower amount of worldwide transit; it has a management overhead so it doesn't pay until your bandwidth bill starts growing, which is why most people will start off by taking "only" straight unrestricted transit at a higher cost per Mbps/Gbps)
You can also pay per GB/TB and end up paying far less than AWS.
E.g. at Hetzner, you pay per TB over a minimum limit, just like with AWS. For Hetzner, the current overage rate is €1.17 per TB. I have no reason to assume that they're losing on money on that - they'be be able to hand most of that off via peering agreements.
> I'd be interested to hear particulars of this. Obviously it is your edge case, but I find it hard to believe that somebody can cut their costs that much unless they were way over-provisioned on AWS or they are not really counting all of the costs. I have never seen a DC that didn't have more management overhead to run than a full cloud offering.
They moved EC2 instances to Hetzner instances of roughly same speed. That's all there was too it - Hetzner server prices are low, and their bandwidth prices are as mentioned about €1.17 per TB above a limit per instance that's large enough that they've yet to exceed them, and that's the thing that's making the biggest difference (I've actually in the past cut peoples AWS bills by putting boxes at Hetzner and elsewhere purely as caches in front of their AWS setups because of the huge bandwidth differential - for people who spend much on bandwidth, it can pay for the extra servers many times over)
My experience is that we had no problems meeting similar bandwidth levels per machine as they did at AWS. Management is roughly the same complexity. They ended up using "bare metal" dedicated servers (Hetzner also offers VPSs) so they have access to IPMI to manage reboots etc. as necessary, and Hetzners rescue system lets them reimage the servers at will, so after investing a few k on scripting server installs it's as automated as their AWS setup was. They pay a very minimal extra overhead in an encrypted VPN between instances (and with current setup would pay for bandwidth for that if they exceed the included bandwidth allotment), though you can avoid this with some extra complexity (you can pay Hetzner some small fee and get servers wired up to a private network).
The cost difference includes the per-hour costs paid to keep either service running - the latter setup has actually cost them less in time spent managing it.
Exactly. The idea that Oracle can catch up based on pricing & machine specs ("36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM") is really naive.
My current position on this is that IaaS is pretty much over. Aliyun & AWS seem like they're going to dominate. Microsoft & Google & others fight for the rest. Maybe, just maybe, Oracle will catch up with the 'small' players, but I doubt Microsoft++ or Google will be sitting on their hands wondering how much DRAM Oracle is going to wow us all with next.
Sure, but having a compelling story about compute and having a massive advantage in knowledge of how to sell to the exact kinds of enterprises that haven't already made their big transition to the cloud yet isn't a bad combination to have if you want to establish a nice firm place in cloud. from which you can expand and develop what you need to bite off other parts of the market.
They aren't going to follow the same path as AWS, both because they aren't, as a corporation, oriented toward that path and because the low-hanging fruit you can pick up along that path has already been picked up by AWS.
AWS got a lot of startups and tech savvy companies (like Netflix). If I were Oracle I would target existing customers, who generally are not the tech savvy darlings (think Procter & Gamble, health companies, food companies, banks...) who can now tell their board their on-site Oracle licences have been moved to the cloud.
It's a market Oracle is uniquely qualified to pursue because they already have the sales operation and contacts in place. Now whether they are able to execute is why we are eating the popcorn and watching. The inside sales model is the 20th century sales model after all.
Oracle allows licensing on VMware on a hypervisor level. When VMware allowed you to vMotion between hosts in a vSphere HA cluster, Oracle would require that you license all the hosts in the cluster because the Oracle VMs might land on any of those hosts in a failover situation. When cross-cluster vMotion came with 5.1, the customer was told that they must license every host attached to that vCenter instance, forcing the customer to purchase and implement another vCenter strictly for Oracle.
And now, with vSphere 6, comes cross-vCenter vMotion. You can guess where that conversation with Oracle went. Customer bought an Oracle Enterprise license, which is presumably what the sales rep had in mind the whole time.
http://houseofbrick.com/mars-vs-oracle/
Microsoft has a lot of the same kind of sales operation and contacts, and they have a suite of cloud infrastructure that's on par with AWS.
You mean what IBM is doing/has done? Oracle doesn't know how to sell to those people, it knows how to EXTORT those people. Most people I know hate Oracle with a passion as a business, and only continue to do business with them out of obligation.
Don't rule out the power of acquisitions (see: Firebase/Google, Parse/Facebook). Word on the street is that they're also throwing silly mounds of cash at cloud talent.
Seems like a bunch of people around seattle are getting the mounds of cash.
I also know enough about the project to know it is a serious and daring effort and there is every reason to be proud of it.
The development cluster alone is something very special to be part of.
Hope you are enjoying it
from elsewhere:
> Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with, etc...), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.
1.) Amazon has a much higher bar for hiring talent, than Oracle does.
2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products.
3.) Amazon shareholders are already use to the company not being profitable, where as Oracle shareholders are not.
I knew some Oracle engineers back in the day. They were sharp. I hope they made their millions and got the heck out of that place.
The people who sign the cheques and listen to their salespeople.
I never got to hear the Oracle rep's side of the phone conversation, but everyone within 50 feet of the CIO's office got to hear his.
"Fine! You want to fuck me on these licenses! Go right ahead! And then I'll turn around and fuck you by throwing you out of our datacenter!"
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 software vs open source. Is there absolutely no alternative?
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).
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.
This then raises issues of compatibility with your customer's environments. The configuration matrix that you'd need to test is tedious (read: costly) in traditional software releases compared to SaaS where you're free to make a lot of decisions independent of your customer and not everything can be automated (anyone that's deployed automated tests against TN3270 terminals with a lukewarm IQ QA department is right to challenge this). Then there's longevity. What happens when your biggest paying customer wants you to stay on IE 8 until 2025 (not an exaggeration)? Want to create yet another customer-specific branch? Eventually you wind up needing a test environment that matches exactly what that customer has and paying contractors to maintain that dead-end tech stack and doing that for every customer. That is quite common and also quite costly but not needing much talent, so the washed up maintenance engineers go here at less than mediocre compensation to cut costs. That's zombie software for you - the soul and spirit of engineers are gone and its corpse is animated by money by a cruel master that cares little for its past life.
They may be used to being frugal, but that is not at all reflected in AWS pricing, which is ridiculously high across the board.
I make a lot of my income cutting peoples infrastructure costs by optimising their setups, and a lot of it involves moving people off AWS (I also move people onto AWS when they have needs that are actually best met there - there are lots of AWS services I love, but they are expensive) to save money. I can generally price my services at a few months worth of their savings.
Competing with AWS on price isn't the hard part. The challenge is the amount of people that either don't care, or think that AWS is cheap without having done realistic comparisons.
But for Oracle, those are exactly the type of customers they have built their entire business around selling to.
1. What's constraining AWS's growth capacity? Isn't it simply a matter of stamping out AZs and DCs?
2. Why would Amazone create a pricing structure which encourages new entrants into the field? Contrast local retail in which defunct firms continue to sit on, and extend, real-estate leases, strictly to prevent other companies from growing into the market they've abandoned. See Dominicks / Anderson grocery stores in the Chicago area, in which seventy-two stores are being leased, at a cost of ~$1m/year, each, to prevent competitors from occupying the space:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-vacant-dominicks-s...
(This works in part because rent is only a small part of the operational cost of a grocery store: electric power, labour, maintenance, and of course, groceries, are required if you're actually utilising the space.)
Because the primary entrant threats were not going to be dissuaded by low price competition. Specifically Microsoft and Google. Both are hyper cash and income rich and under no circumstances did they want to cede the cloud computing universe to Amazon. Fundamentally it's the exact same reason AWS stopped trying to compete so intensely on price cuts quite a while back now.
Put another way, if you're going up against Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle - speaking hypothetically it's better to own 1/3 of the market and print significant operating income, than to own 1/2 of the market and barely make money. That operating income is responsible for roughly doubling the value of Amazon's share price (the stock took off like a rocket after it became clear AWS was going to be a cash-cow).
But their margins should be large enough, and have been for so many years, that they should have been able to take that into account and adjust expansion accordingly.
I'm more inclined to think that they have simply decided to milk it while they can. I rarely meet people who have any clue what their infrastructure choices actually cost them and what they would pay elsewhere, and I regularly have conversations about how much people believe they'd save by moving to/from provider X where it transpires that said person hasn't even tried costing it out but are certain they'll save money. I also regularly talk to IT departments that have no kind of budget or forecasting in place for their hosting requirements. The state of budgeting for server infrastructure is simply shocking. In that kind of environment, if you price based on actual cost, rather than based on whether or not people believe you're expensive, you're leaving money on the table.
Do they? Isn't it all just rolling the dice on algorithm trivia at this point?
> Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them.
eye roll.
> Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products.
Doesn't mean they don't know how to price a product like this.
> Amazon shareholders are already use to the company not being profitable, where as Oracle shareholders are not
Who says oracle is going to blow all their profits?
Oracle has been poaching the core EC2 team from Amazon for years now, in Seattle there are farewell parties every week for another person leaving EC2 to work at Oracle
* Since they seem to be targeting a hybrid approach, how flexible will they be at building and customizing network tunnels to multiple data centers and branch offices?
* Will they allow you to host webservers there, or will you have to figure out how to network to another data center - and will it run Java, or can you get Apache or Docker? IIS with License Mobility?
* What will they do about human error creating routing loops or erroneous BGP broadcasts, when they expand or perform maintenance?
* How will they mitigate both external DDoS and compromised machine attacks from inside?
Running a multi-data center MSP is no easy feat. It will be interesting to see what solutions are developed by Oracle's offering to the above problems.
Yes. I used to work at a major networking company in Seattle, and Oracle has recruited many good people from there, and is paying them nose-ruining salaries. I think their cloud may have many problems, but I doubt networking infrastructure will be one of them.
I'm surprised people still aren't aware of the massive talent transfer from AWS to Oracle.
This is much larger than just compute. A constant stream of principles and SDE3s have been moving for well over a year. Most of the senior engineers on my team have moved with 60% raises. I'm just waiting for their non-competes to expire.
Does hubris lead to sales if you have Oracle-like customers?
There were lasers.
There was dry ice.
Vanessa Mae was playing the electric violin.
A director on stage bellowed we will bring $competitor TO THEIR KNEES!
Everyone was on their feet cheering, I've been to metal gigs that were less intense. Oracle takes sales very, very seriously.
bluster: check hubris: check realism: nope
I would have expected that someone who takes marketing very, very seriously tries to sound realistic, not overoptimistic or full of that which makes plants grow.
Saying "oracle's database rocks" and asking for a stiff price has a certain touch of realism. I can see how a good salesforce can do that with success. My question is along the lines of: Can a good salesforce use bluster as a main tool to sell something shitty, such as oracle's IaaS offering? How does that sales process work?
Well, yes, obviously and consistently. The sales process starts on the golf course/opera/football private box
For example, I'd prefer to run Debian instead of RHEL, but since the stack I have to support uses Oracle and Websphere, my hands are tied.
Here you go: https://gaiustech.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/howto-install-ora...
This is like looking at any other marketshare debate. Amazon/Google may win the majority of users, but MS and Oracle are going to get the ones with deep pockets. They don't need me and my piddly weekend project, or most startups. They'll make a mint off a handful of lucrative government contracts, and contracts with the defense contractors that go Oracle because the gov't has pushed it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-de...
The moral of the story is: AWS is all public cloud, but if you're the CIA and give them $600MM... you can have a private cloud too!
But Google are quick studies, have a vast amount of already-paid-for infrastructure and software, and as much cash as the others.
But then, it's Sun's technology, not Oracle's...
Also, Larry Ellison has a history of overselling whatever Oracle's doing, so I doubt the product will be as good as he says in any case.
http://www.businessinsider.com/terminator-genisys-cyberdyne-...
The subquery is optional.
I just got the page about this Sev-2 Sun Microsystems comment on HN, and I am working this ticket. If you haven't already, please see our docs on Why Sun Microsystems Failed[1]. If I don't hear back from you, I will mark this ticket as closed. Thank you for only remembering Sun Microsystems with kindness, and have a great day!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
Don't get me wrong, Sun was a great company, but like all companies, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. You've said as much yourself before.
I wished to point out that there was a time that Sun wasn't as beloved, and to indicate some of the reasons that we don't talk about some of Sun's less savory actions so much on HN.
If, as an ex-Sun employee, you find this insulting (and the trace elements of sarcasm indicate that this may be so), than I will inform you that it certainly wasn't meant to be so, although I now see why it may come off that way.
Thank you for responding to my ticket, and have a great day!
> https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2132
> Make money, make money!
:D
If you depend on their proprietary software, you deserve what you get.
Oracle might be stupid, but they're not dumb.
For those Fortune 500 companies who've made the shift to cloud services Amazon currently fills the role that Oracle does in data storage. I'm sure there's plenty of Fortune 500 CIOs who are still hesitant to embrace the cloud in general, but If there's a CIO out there who's moving some services to the cloud going with Oracle over Amazon just because its Oracle then they're out of their element.
Evil empire comments aside more cloud infrastructure competition is good for us all.
The quote they use doesn't sound like he has "little doubt"
> "In terms of market leadership, I think Oracle will have to produce much faster growth rates to really get ahead of Amazon or even Microsoft in IaaS, and analysts will be watching its spend on data-centers to track this," he said.
(I heavily use Lambda)
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.
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