Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid(bloomberg.com)
bloomberg.com
Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/oracle-is-said-to-lead-anti-amazon-lobby-on-pentagon-cloud-bid
25 comments
I currently work as a solutions engineer on Oracle Cloud. The product is absolute garbage and I'm miserable. If anyone has any good leads on other positions please let me know!
You sound exactly like the two oracle engineers I spoke to circa 2000. “We hate WebDB. If you don’t buy it, we’ll get made redundant and can sign on and get free education to do something other than IT. Please don’t buy it. Think of our children”.
I exaggerate but not by much.
I exaggerate but not by much.
Happy to help - there are plenty of open positions on the AWS team!
Hey thanks for the kind words, I sent you an email. Have a great weekend!
Are you the same person, and if so, why a different account??
Yes, sorry it is the same person, I apologize for the confusion. I was eating dinner and was using my phone and then came home and switched to my computer. In retrospect I can see how that might seem offputting.
Forgot the password to the throwaway?
I was expecting "Happy to answer any questions you have!", but this was a refreshing twist. Hoping for the best bud.
Are you able to share any specific complaints, gripes or issues? This entire thread is an Oracle bash fest without much specific data or information.
Don't get me wrong, not a huge fan of Oracle but am curious to know if there is an actual problem, or if this is simply a hater-ade/fanboy party with no substance.
Don't get me wrong, not a huge fan of Oracle but am curious to know if there is an actual problem, or if this is simply a hater-ade/fanboy party with no substance.
Given that my comment blew up and has high visibility I feel I probably shouldn't share anything specific. It was a pretty much throw away comment that I didn't expect to get as much attention as it did. The best I can say is that after working for the company I think that the general news.ycombinator.com beliefs on the performance of Oracle are entirely justified. I thought going in that it may have been overblown, like you say some sort of "startups are cool, big corps are evil boo" kind of thing, but it is not. I love the people I work with in my section! Just, not the overall firm.
I wonder if there will be a management witch hunt against the Solutions Engineering team on Monday provoked by your post.
Well the joke would be on management. I am sure that ALL of the solutions engineers think that the product is garbage, given that they are the ones who have to deal with the problems.
I am sure that ALL of the solutions engineers think that the product is garbage, given that they are the ones who have to deal with the problems.
On the other hand, without the problems, the solution engineers might not exist...
...which is, in one sentence, the reason why Oracle consultants exist.
On the other hand, without the problems, the solution engineers might not exist...
...which is, in one sentence, the reason why Oracle consultants exist.
If you are still looking about, our group at Microsoft - CSE (commercial software engineering) is hiring. Some evangelism, lots of open source, the group I am part of works heavily with both the open source side of things as well as the product team around Kubernetes.
> ... but am curious to know if there is an actual problem, or if this is simply a hater-ade/fanboy party with no substance.
You've never had to deal with Oracle sales or "support" staff or -- even worse -- manage or support Oracle products in production, have you? If you had, well, you would already know the answer. Oracle RDBMS might be the one exception.
(FWIW, I mean "real" Oracle products, not, say, MySQL or Oracle Linux, for example.)
You've never had to deal with Oracle sales or "support" staff or -- even worse -- manage or support Oracle products in production, have you? If you had, well, you would already know the answer. Oracle RDBMS might be the one exception.
(FWIW, I mean "real" Oracle products, not, say, MySQL or Oracle Linux, for example.)
The Oracle cloud is available to anyone and comes with $300 of credit: https://cloud.oracle.com/home
Ignore the comments and just try it. Run an instance for a weekend, try to setup a site or install a DB and see how it goes. I think you'll learn very quickly why the reputation exists.
Ignore the comments and just try it. Run an instance for a weekend, try to setup a site or install a DB and see how it goes. I think you'll learn very quickly why the reputation exists.
The pricing seems... really weird. Many very different offerings are priced exactly the same. E.g.
VM.Standard.1.1 and VM.Standard1.16, same cost but the latter has 16 cores instead of 1 (same CPU), 112 GB memory instead of 7.
https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/pricing
VM.Standard.1.1 and VM.Standard1.16, same cost but the latter has 16 cores instead of 1 (same CPU), 112 GB memory instead of 7.
https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/pricing
If you ever think you understand the price of anything Oracle, take it as a signal that you are wrong.
The pricing is per OCPU (Oracle CPU core) per hour. 16 cores = 16x the listed price for a single core. But yes, the table is a perfect example of how bad everything is.
Amazon's AWS team probably contacts me once a month with job offers. I suspect you could reach out to them and get yourself a much better job. My friend who works for them loves it.
I've a friend up in Washington that loves it. That said, I've worked with a lot of ex-AWS people that couldn't stand the culture.
I've been contacted and interviews a few times with AWS and threat Intel team but never got ANY followup after the second interview. It's disheartening. At this point I'm ready to give up. Why do their recruiters keep reaching out If they never even give a Yay /nay after six months and two interviews?
Yeah I worked in PDIT on some of the cloud stuff and it was a sad joke. Get out, you won’t regret it.
I've heard IBM's Cloud is much the same.
The only thing it has in common with a proper cloud thing like AWS or GCP is the 'cloud' in the name.
The only thing it has in common with a proper cloud thing like AWS or GCP is the 'cloud' in the name.
Isn't IBM's cloud offering built on top of Cloud Foundry? (Not saying you are wrong, just trying to figure out which partner is to blame)
No. IaaS is Softlayer which they acquired, a mix between VMs and dedicated machines. Worked well before but networking is now obsolete, operations too manual, and any price advantage is long gone.
The rest of their products are managed services running on this, similar to the other clouds, and they work fine for what they are. Bandwidth costs are always the limiting factor though with any cross-cloud situation and their Watson AI is useless and nowhere near what they hype.
The rest of their products are managed services running on this, similar to the other clouds, and they work fine for what they are. Bandwidth costs are always the limiting factor though with any cross-cloud situation and their Watson AI is useless and nowhere near what they hype.
Wouldn't matter what it's built on :-)
I'm having the same experience with Azure after coming from AWS.
Ditto. Kinda.
I moved a lot of infra out of AWS and into GKE which I'm loving. Outside of GKE, which is great. GCP has a few things that I like better than AWS.
I also moved some infra into Azure, specifically into ACS, and then AKS and now ACS-engine.
It is very much not great.
I moved a lot of infra out of AWS and into GKE which I'm loving. Outside of GKE, which is great. GCP has a few things that I like better than AWS.
I also moved some infra into Azure, specifically into ACS, and then AKS and now ACS-engine.
It is very much not great.
Oracle: the company who would ruin the software industry just to win a lawsuit against Google. Fuck em.
It's sad that these politics might win because the Oracle cloud is one of the worst products I've ever used, especially from such a massive company that could easily put out something better if it wasn't the epitome of misery in customer relations led by clueless management.
Will you please elaborate? I'm looking to evaluate it myself, and curious to hear what issues you ran into with it.
Took us a month to get our data out because there's apparently no offline data copy option available from their data center.
- Several slow disjointed UI consoles that will log you out when switching. The services dashboard has permanent warning that it might not show everything and you should just "retry the operation". The nav menu doesn't fit the names of the menu choices so you dont know what to click on. Same things are named differently depending on which console you're in. There is no categorization or organization of what is where. Would be 1000x improved if they just remembered your current tenant name in a damn cookie.
- Support is so hard to reach that you need support to get support. Requires creating a separate user account just to file a ticket and I've since been unable to log back in because the Oracle SSO was somehow not connected to our tenant's identity instance (which I cant find in our console), but I cant get them to reset since I must file tickets from that account. There seem to be 3 different documentation sites and they link to PDF books.
- There are only 4 regions globally, 2 in the US. No concept of availability zones. Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux. In past 2 weeks, there were 3 emergency maintenance events. Maintenance is not automatic and there is no concept of "live migration" or any attempt to not reboot your VM. Networking is nowhere near listed capacity in use.
- Managed services are completely separated from IaaS resources. They can take hours to deploy. Less control (as expected) but still require maintenance packs to be applied manually. Maintenance can also take hours. Event hubs service doesn't even show you how much disk is available. Seems like they are nothing more than templates to trigger some instances in a hidden cloud account.
- There is no pricing within the console so you must reference documentation. This doesn't cover any hidden pricing for operations. There is no billing dashboard anywhere, so you don't know costs at all until the bill comes.
- Too tired to list anything else. There is no advantage compared to any other cloud or even 2nd tier colo. The prices are also more expensive. It is a nightmare we are forced to use for the integration cloud since Oracle has no modern concept of "apps" for any of its products.
- Support is so hard to reach that you need support to get support. Requires creating a separate user account just to file a ticket and I've since been unable to log back in because the Oracle SSO was somehow not connected to our tenant's identity instance (which I cant find in our console), but I cant get them to reset since I must file tickets from that account. There seem to be 3 different documentation sites and they link to PDF books.
- There are only 4 regions globally, 2 in the US. No concept of availability zones. Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux. In past 2 weeks, there were 3 emergency maintenance events. Maintenance is not automatic and there is no concept of "live migration" or any attempt to not reboot your VM. Networking is nowhere near listed capacity in use.
- Managed services are completely separated from IaaS resources. They can take hours to deploy. Less control (as expected) but still require maintenance packs to be applied manually. Maintenance can also take hours. Event hubs service doesn't even show you how much disk is available. Seems like they are nothing more than templates to trigger some instances in a hidden cloud account.
- There is no pricing within the console so you must reference documentation. This doesn't cover any hidden pricing for operations. There is no billing dashboard anywhere, so you don't know costs at all until the bill comes.
- Too tired to list anything else. There is no advantage compared to any other cloud or even 2nd tier colo. The prices are also more expensive. It is a nightmare we are forced to use for the integration cloud since Oracle has no modern concept of "apps" for any of its products.
a lot of the issues you list would likely be considered desirable features by DOD standards
There was a time when Oracle's database product was kind of like IBM mainframes. If you could afford it, and really needed its capabilities, there was no substitute.
As a result, their sales and business practices focus on selling huge deployments to Big Enterprise and large government contracts.
Not surprising they never really made inroads with small developers and startups, and why they have the reputation they do in that community.
As a result, their sales and business practices focus on selling huge deployments to Big Enterprise and large government contracts.
Not surprising they never really made inroads with small developers and startups, and why they have the reputation they do in that community.
In my experience, Oracle's been doing a wonderful job at spreading their current reputation beyond the smaller developers community.
Why do you think they never won the hearts of the people who actually had to use the product?
Well, I used Oracle rdbms for a number of years and quite liked it.
Their business applications on the other hand I have never used but have heard they are pretty much horrible.
Their business applications on the other hand I have never used but have heard they are pretty much horrible.
They indeed are horrible. What is worse is that, out of the box, they don't do much, and the stuff they do is guaranteed to not fit your business. So you end up needing customization, and that's when shit gets real expensive.
I love oracle db and so do lots of dbas.
Oracle the core-RDBMS is great. It’s everything they’ve layered on top of it, like the ERP stuff, that is horrific.
But now Oracle is going to companies and saying hey you don’t need DBAs, use our cloud. The right thing for all Oracle DBAs to do right now is to push for their orgs to move wholescale to Postgres. Hit Oracle where it hurts.
But now Oracle is going to companies and saying hey you don’t need DBAs, use our cloud. The right thing for all Oracle DBAs to do right now is to push for their orgs to move wholescale to Postgres. Hit Oracle where it hurts.
oracle is completely unable to create an application that shows anything other than a database table or tables, yet all of their sales are targeted to business users not DBAs.
So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal? That sounds like about half the stuff you get with politics and lawyers. I thought you'd get something more factual with technology, but I guess Oracle is more like a lawyer-lobby business that just happens to make or resell software.
> So they go anti-the-other-guy instead of making sure they have the better deal?
How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid.
> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion-dollar deal.
How can you make sure you have a better deal... when the process is not open to you? The article says open Amazon are being allowed to bid and the first aim of Oracle is to just be allowed to bid.
> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company and unseat Amazon as the front-runner for the multibillion-dollar deal.
Knowing that AWS vs. Oracle means AWS wins comes from clicking around in the interface and using the API for a few minutes. Even if Oracle was free it would not be worth the pain.
They are allowed to bid. They just want the Pentagon to split its information across multiple cloud products because they find it unlikely that they'll win such a big contract on merit alone.
> The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department’s technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September.
What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality".
> The Pentagon has said it intends to move the department’s technology needs -- 3.4 million users and 4 million devices -- to the cloud, indicating the massive size of the award. Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have repeatedly said no decision about the winner-take-all contract has been pre-made and that bids will be considered on their merits, with an award to a company or a team of companies expected in September.
What rational reason would there be for a corporation or government entity to spread its information across multiple cloud products? That would be like mandating that half a company use LibreOffice and the other half Office365 for the sake of "equality".
What rational reason would a large organization with such sensitive information have to move to the cloud at all? This seems horrifically stupid from an organizational and informational risk perspective.
Anytime that the main proficiency of this large organization is not data center management. Which is most of the time.
This has to be willful ignorance designed to pretend its just about managing hardware while ignoring the elephant in the room of compromising your business's (and client's) privacy.
You might not like data center management, but the trade you are making is giving hypervisor control to a third party with 10s of thousands of employees outside of your oversight which also happens to be one of the most valuable targets for hackers in the world. You could easily have AWS employees (or hackers who have compromised the control network) dumping everything interesting from your HD images to the highest bidder and you have no means to detect this.
AWS is okay if you are only collecting relatively innocuous consumer account info, but it's completely unacceptable for any companies holding data/executing processes that can have a major impact on society when it leaks/fails.
You might not like data center management, but the trade you are making is giving hypervisor control to a third party with 10s of thousands of employees outside of your oversight which also happens to be one of the most valuable targets for hackers in the world. You could easily have AWS employees (or hackers who have compromised the control network) dumping everything interesting from your HD images to the highest bidder and you have no means to detect this.
AWS is okay if you are only collecting relatively innocuous consumer account info, but it's completely unacceptable for any companies holding data/executing processes that can have a major impact on society when it leaks/fails.
Amazon has GovCloud which offers additional security and meets regulatory requirements for nation-state level sensitive information.
I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amazon hasn't been lobbying agencies and congress to get their business? Why do you think that Bezos bought the Washington Post?
Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad.
Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad.
Amazon is sometimes less than perfect, but they operate in hypercompetitive markets where customers can easily switch away. This builds an entirely different kind of company than an Oracle or a big defense contractor. Fundamentally CIA and DOD cloud requirements aren't that different from large existing AWS workloads so it's nearly the existing COTS product. (There's a bit of security on top, some of which is better in commercial AWS than in most locked-down S/TS environments already, some of which can be retrofitted onto AWS easily, and much of which is just policy, but the rest of the product is basically already fine.)
I would trust an arbitrary product which competes on the marketplace and is sold into government on a COTS basis more than virtually anything arising out of government/vendor insanity. (I'd probably go with a purely-Government solution if it were a really specialized thing and of small enough scale, developed organically by the end user org, more than a traditional procurement thing, but COTS generally is the winner whenever a COTS option exists.)
I would trust an arbitrary product which competes on the marketplace and is sold into government on a COTS basis more than virtually anything arising out of government/vendor insanity. (I'd probably go with a purely-Government solution if it were a really specialized thing and of small enough scale, developed organically by the end user org, more than a traditional procurement thing, but COTS generally is the winner whenever a COTS option exists.)
If you think that Amazon got where it has in government because of competition, I have a bridge to sell you. That's not how business is done in the public sector. It's just not. Years of legislation have built massive systems of patronage that must be satisfied no matter what service or system you provide.
"Trust a product"...that's part of the problem right there. Why do we have to trust them? It's just weird how emotion becomes part of this. I'm not trying to single you out or anything. I do it too, reflexively.
I guess my point is that the only difference between Oracle and Amazon are some letters in the name and some circumstances. If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same way under a different set of circumstances, then you are going to be let down.
Maybe I'm just rambling...I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the IT industry and American business in general. It's all just so incredibly short sighted.
"Trust a product"...that's part of the problem right there. Why do we have to trust them? It's just weird how emotion becomes part of this. I'm not trying to single you out or anything. I do it too, reflexively.
I guess my point is that the only difference between Oracle and Amazon are some letters in the name and some circumstances. If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same way under a different set of circumstances, then you are going to be let down.
Maybe I'm just rambling...I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the IT industry and American business in general. It's all just so incredibly short sighted.
Amazon got where it is in the general marketplace by building winning products. It then used that incumbency to be the obvious choice to expand into the public sector, competing with largely incompetent companies.
It's the same thing when USG buys efficient, highly-optimized products like, say, regular pickup trucks polarises and such for fleets, rather than paying LockMart/NG/Boeing/BAE to build them a custom "non-tactical advanced transport device".
It's the same thing when USG buys efficient, highly-optimized products like, say, regular pickup trucks polarises and such for fleets, rather than paying LockMart/NG/Boeing/BAE to build them a custom "non-tactical advanced transport device".
I disagree.
And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public.
Oh my god. I get it. You like Amazon. Sorry, I'm just more cynical than I think allows me to be polite at times. I'm really not trying to be rude.
I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it.
The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.
I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it.
The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.
Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product.
It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest.
Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority.
They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.
Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority.
They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.
To me, amazon has earned a reputation for being extremely customer friendly, consistently working to drive down prices, and funneling all of their cash flows into R&D/growth.
Idk about you, but those are probably the top 3 attributes I want in a company that manages my infrastructure.
Idk about you, but those are probably the top 3 attributes I want in a company that manages my infrastructure.
If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same manner under different circumstances, you are in for a let down. They are a business, Oracle is doing what's "right for their shareholders". They all behave this way.
Sorry, I should have clarified but I was responding to the “Amazon fan-boi-ism” point.
What “manner” are you talking about?
What “manner” are you talking about?
I think it's a terrible idea for the DoD (of all departments) to move all their infrastructure to any commercial cloud, Amazon or Oracle. So much critical infrastructure in the hands of a single company. What could possibly go wrong? They get hacked, experience significant outages, or worse, go out of business, and poof there goes all of the DoD's infrastructure... Whoever wins the bid will definitely become "too big to fail".
I see you aren't familiar with the DoD's (non-critical) infrastructure. Self hosted services go down for not insignificant periods of time not infrequently. Half the time if something goes down and the wrong person is out of the office, it doesn't get fixed until they come back.
I think fragmentation is the problem.
(Disclaimer: I've been out of the defense contracting business for some time)
I think fragmentation is the problem.
(Disclaimer: I've been out of the defense contracting business for some time)
It kind of shocks me that the DoD isn't looking for a vendor-agnostic implementation and then using the resources of multiple vendors. Not only is it key for resiliency from failure, but also it guarantees price competition, whereas being dependent on one vendor lets them jack up the price for all future transactions.
Vendor agnostic solutions come with overhead. Check out the PCF sizing tool. Running just the EC2 instances required to _manage_ a production environment starts at $30k/year per region using 1 year RIs. That doesn't include the Diego compute nodes that actually run your workload.
What do you get out of the deal? Software that makes AWS look like...AWS.
All three vendors appear to have settled on Kubernetes as the next level of abstraction. It would be great to see dollars that would have otherwise gone to Oracle enhance the capabilities of k8s.
What do you get out of the deal? Software that makes AWS look like...AWS.
All three vendors appear to have settled on Kubernetes as the next level of abstraction. It would be great to see dollars that would have otherwise gone to Oracle enhance the capabilities of k8s.
Sounds like Oracle's core business of fucking everyone up for no reason. Larry you are a true POS <3
Cheap, but let’s all enjoy Larry Ellison on “the cloud”
https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY
https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY
Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc?
I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.
I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.
For the most part, they don't know how to do it, and people who are good at it have better opportunities than government jobs
Should they build their own planes, too? Just hire some engineers and make it happen, right?
Governments outsource because the best people in various industries aren't working for the government (for lots of different reasons).
Governments outsource because the best people in various industries aren't working for the government (for lots of different reasons).
Seeing how the F-35 worked out, maybe they should consider it
Wouldn't the better comparison be if they just rented the planes from the manufacturer though? Or even better, have a 3rd party company buy and maintain the aircraft and they just rented the aircraft from them. What could go wrong?
datacenter construction and management is not exactly rocket science in 2018.
It absolutely is not as simple as you seem to make it sound though... a poorly experienced team will end up costing more in time and money than the markup of an outsourced but scaled efficient team.
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The US government outsources everything. Anything actually being produced or operated is done by some vendor on a government contract, with the big exception of the military (which still has plenty of outsourced business).
Government IT expertise is not high-quality and will never match what AWS has. It's about value, not cost. It's better to have reliable and scalable infrastructure even if AWS is vastly more expensive.
Government IT expertise is not high-quality and will never match what AWS has. It's about value, not cost. It's better to have reliable and scalable infrastructure even if AWS is vastly more expensive.
It just takes a lot of people and experience to do that. There are a few companies out there that can are already set up well for that. I don't know if I'd put Oracle in that list but Amazon isn't the only one with the experience.
At US government scale, they’d come out ahead if executed by the US Digital Service (no politics, executed rapidly). Amazon has outrageous margins on AWS, margins that could be better spent by the government on equipment and technical talent.
Ideally, they’d contribute to OpenStack through such an initiative, ensuring an open source alternative to commercial closed cloud providers.
I don’t want my tax dollars going towards Bezo’s attempts at a retail and cloud computing monopoly, but that’s just me. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for Trump considering his disdain for Bezos and the USDS being part of the Executive Office of the President.
Ideally, they’d contribute to OpenStack through such an initiative, ensuring an open source alternative to commercial closed cloud providers.
I don’t want my tax dollars going towards Bezo’s attempts at a retail and cloud computing monopoly, but that’s just me. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for Trump considering his disdain for Bezos and the USDS being part of the Executive Office of the President.
The government tried to do this stuff in-house. It turns out it's ridiculously cheaper to let Amazon do it. This kind of move saves you tax money.
disagree. There comes a certain scale where doing it yourself is way cheaper. There's other reasons to outsource to Amazon than just cost though
There is way more that goes in to operating a large scale computing infrastructure efficiently than the cost of hardware. Like way, way more. If anyone could replicate it at the right scale then every large organization would be competing with Amazon for the cloud infrastructure market.
Way more?
Nah.
I ran a couple data centers on either coast each burning about half a megawatt, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of thing. My employer at the time offered a SaaS product to Fortune 100 companies. The product required a realtime kernel and QOS in the network, neither of which is supported in AWS.
I did a fair bit of math comparing costs. Typically, you could pay off the CapEx with 6 months of usage in AWS.
IIRC we had around $8m in salaries for the ops org. I'm not sure we would've needed a great deal fewer people having all that infra in AWS.
The real problem comes from trying to find a team of people willing to engineer your service for failure. That kind of attitude just doesn't exist in the world of IT, so anyone would be hard pressed to put a team together.
Good luck finding a network engineering team that knows BGP well enough for such a thing. Good luck finding a team of engineers that know Openstack well enough to keep it running. Good luck finding folks to run Ceph. Good luck getting all that right.
If you could, though, there are certainly savings to be had.
Nah.
I ran a couple data centers on either coast each burning about half a megawatt, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of thing. My employer at the time offered a SaaS product to Fortune 100 companies. The product required a realtime kernel and QOS in the network, neither of which is supported in AWS.
I did a fair bit of math comparing costs. Typically, you could pay off the CapEx with 6 months of usage in AWS.
IIRC we had around $8m in salaries for the ops org. I'm not sure we would've needed a great deal fewer people having all that infra in AWS.
The real problem comes from trying to find a team of people willing to engineer your service for failure. That kind of attitude just doesn't exist in the world of IT, so anyone would be hard pressed to put a team together.
Good luck finding a network engineering team that knows BGP well enough for such a thing. Good luck finding a team of engineers that know Openstack well enough to keep it running. Good luck finding folks to run Ceph. Good luck getting all that right.
If you could, though, there are certainly savings to be had.
We aren't talking about a datacenter to support one product. We are talking about an entire platform for building and operating any number of products on top. It isn't comparable.
I referred to the two data centers I had in the US.
How many data centers do you think Oracle operates in the US, presently?
How many data centers do you think Oracle operates in the US, presently?
Is this your opinion because you work at Amazon? Or because you can prove this to be the case?
Can you prove your case? If you are correct it's just a matter of scale, it stands to reason that any large organization would be muscling in on the high-margin cloud computing business. That clearly is not the case. But I'm happy to see any evidence you have to the contrary.
Sometimes there are diseconomies of scale as well. Like all of a sudden you have to put a data center into an otherwise shitty location because the committee chairman needs to show some results to constituents.
Or two departments have essentially the same requirements, but they compete for budget and each have to justify their staffing by duplicating effort.
(These pathologies aren't unique to government. You can also find them in large private companies.)
Or two departments have essentially the same requirements, but they compete for budget and each have to justify their staffing by duplicating effort.
(These pathologies aren't unique to government. You can also find them in large private companies.)
"There's other reasons to outsource to Amazon than just cost though"
I think that falls under the `other reasons`
I think that falls under the `other reasons`
There's a certain scale where it is definitely possible to do it cheaper, but the government isn't really able to do that. Even if the program didn't crash and burn (fairly likely- there's plenty of examples of billion dollar government software programs that turned into vaporware), it'd be taking on a ton of risk just to set up the same thing without the AWS profit margin (maybe 10-20%?)
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For the same reason any consumer of cloud services would.
Building data centers is expensive and on-demand compute is nice
Building data centers is expensive and on-demand compute is nice
It cost the US government $20 billion for air conditioning alone during the Iraq war. A data center is a rounding error.
On demand compute is nice for startups, but overly expensive for mature organizations.
On demand compute is nice for startups, but overly expensive for mature organizations.
Just because they spent $20 billion on this, and $20 billion on that, doesn't mean that they also have another $20 billion they can spend on something else as well. There's no logic in that argument.
Large organizations have the cash flows and reserves to realize efficiencies smaller organizations cannot.
You cannot afford to own a refinery. Delta Airlines can and does, as a hedge against fuel costs (which turned out to be a very profitable decision for them). That is the point.
You cannot afford to own a refinery. Delta Airlines can and does, as a hedge against fuel costs (which turned out to be a very profitable decision for them). That is the point.
They can't afford the technical talent on the GS scales and are unable grow it internally.
Especially when stuff like this tends to happen a lot with AWS:
https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-inscom
https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-inscom
Steering contracts is the way you convert political power into personal wealth.
Because this country was built on privatized everything.
Ever been to DMV ?
Please no, I do not want to use Oracle anything. We are finally starting to embrace open source in this sector.
Worth considering the anti-amazon lobby's position (I really would not want Oracle to get a single slice of the pie though).
Is there a good reason for this contract to a single cloud service provider?
AWS already runs the CIA's private cloud.
Is there a good reason for this contract to a single cloud service provider?
AWS already runs the CIA's private cloud.
I can’t say this often, but I want Amazon to win this deal now.
If anyone in the government is reading this, don't go with oracle please. Not an efficient use of money.
Amazon is definitely the current leader but in order to to make it a monopoly, competetion in cloud should be encouraged that will improve offereing and bring prices down for majority of the users.
I'm calling it now. Oracle will succeed and be the primary benefactor of these efforts. We've already seen that they're in bed with Trump: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankr.... The only things Trump understands are money and favors.
Oracle should go straight to the top: buy advertising time on Fox & Friends.
Oh, of course Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle the trash company. Surprise, surprise.
Oracle, I have a proposition for you. Why don't you release Java and then curl up and die? There is not a reason for you to exist. Your mojo was 20 years ago, why prolong the agony. Save us all trouble and go home.
Would it be possible that when the old guard die or retire at oracle a new guard would be more open and similar to Microsoft’s new stance on open source ?
No. Oracle is all about delivering minimal viable product to institutional customers.
What percentage required of Alphabet+Amazon total capital would be required to just buy oracle and make java totally open source?
Edit: make _all_ products open source Apache license style
Edit: make _all_ products open source Apache license style
What? Java is open source and there have been open source JDKs for many years.
Well, GPL is copyleft right? So I mean making the license less restrictive
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comment...
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Android/comment...
I'm told Oracle's RDBMS has top notch performance at scale - I'd be interested to hear some informed discussion on the topic.
GLWT. Oracle's legal department aggressively prevents the publishing of benchmarks. The EULA for any version of the Oracle RDBMS specifically prohibits releasing benchmarks.
Yeah, they came up with the "DeWitt Clause" and it has made its way into other database EULAs as well. Benchmarks aren't everything though, and they do have their limitations anyway.
Gary, we're working on publishing database numbers. In the meantime, we've made our compute and storage numbers public, in addition to the test suites we used, so you can reproduce the testing if desired. https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/high-performan...
Weird how you never see HN so pro- or anti- a company as when Oracle is mentioned.
Drain the swamp indeed.
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> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than one company
sounds reasonable.
sounds reasonable.
People hate Oracle because they hate competition.
About the only good thing that could come from this is destroying the ability for the DoD to move anything to the cloud. Huge SaaS and IaaS companies are squids wrapping their tentacles around everyone's data and sucking the autonomy out of organizations.
An upstream connectivity outage should be nothing more than an inconvenience, not your lifeline to your lifeline to your only provider of your digital business process and records.
An upstream connectivity outage should be nothing more than an inconvenience, not your lifeline to your lifeline to your only provider of your digital business process and records.