[hn_throwaway_99]

Wow, there must be literally tens of people who are worried right now!

My shitty, snarky comment aside, I am genuinely curious about why someone would choose Oracle as a cloud provider. If you look at their capex spend, it's undeniable they have so vastly underinvested in their cloud compared to AWS, Azure and GCP, that even if you were an "Oracle shop" I'm genuinely curious what benefits their cloud would offer.

Edit: Just want to say I really do appreciate the responses, lots of good info! I didn't know Oracle cloud offered a decent free tier, will take a look.

[NikolaNovak]

I think that's a perspective of people who compare Oracle Cloud IaaS offering to AWS, and find it deficient.

But I don't think that's the actual Oracle Cloud play, for the most part. To the best of my awareness, their cloud is realistically focused on hosted applications and SaaS - HCM Cloud, PeopleSoft Cloud, etc.

As such, their customers are not so much folks and small companies whose client-managed VMs may go down. Their customers are more likely to be large corporations whose Enterprise Resource Planning applications are fully hosted and may be impacted - Financials Management, Human Capital Management, Customer Relationships Management, etc.

I think for the most part Oracle Cloud does not have the same sales pitch and does not compete, for all practical sense, to AWS/Azure/GCP IaaS.

I could be wrong! There might be tons of clients who are renting bare VMs for Oracle! But to your point, I don't know why :P

[SadTrombone]

I'm personally using it because they give you multiple VMs for free. 2x x86 VMs with 1GB of RAM, and 4 ARM (Ampere) VMs with 4 cores + 24GB to split up 4 ways as you see fit. All of that with a combined 200gb of block storage + 10tb of data transfer.

I'm no fan of Oracle, but that's a good amount of free stuff for my hobby projects.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Unfortunately these can disappear without warning. With AWS this basically never happens.

[mbajkowski]

Can you elaborate on this? These are not preemptible, why would they disappear without warning? I've been running on these for 2 or 3 years without any issues thus far.

[BackBlast]

When your account changes from the time based free tier to the only forever free tier they often shut things down. Even if you're careful not to use the time based free tier stuff, which I was, it went pop anyway.

If you're below their "idle system" threshold, they'll shut it down.

Get past the 3 month or whatever it is tier. Put a low level load on the system to get it above the idle threshold and you should be good to have a nice personal playground. Probably.

I've had systems go down to both these. They also have rejected every credit card I tried to throw at them. Which is a known problem for them as well as some other cloud providers. I no longer put anything critical on OCI.

[devrand]

They might be referring to their idle reclamation policy: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

[mbajkowski]

Thanks, very useful, I was not aware of this. There really should be a warning before this happens. I really need test my incremental backups now.

[andrewinardeer]

I can confirm I was given an email about 4 weeks out before they reclaimed my idle VMs.

[procd]

It is the only thing I can call a cloud provider in Saudi Arabia vs Alibaba Cloud. You see not all got all the choices. Why shouldn’t I use something abroad? Laws.

[nine_zeros]

At my last company, the VP got the largest discount from Oracle, so Oracle cloud it was.

Engineer attrition rose. Services took longer to build and maintain. Company's stock went down. Layoffs ensued.

But the VP got promoted to SVP.

[revelio]

Why would services take longer to build? You mean, compared to going all in on every aws service?

[nine_zeros]

Lack of reliability and lack of documentation about corner cases.

[topspin]

"I didn't know Oracle cloud offered a decent free tier"

It's more than their free tier[1]. There are a number of nice things in OCI. For example: Redundant control plane hosts for their non-"free tier" k8s clusters are free. The equivalent of AWS's cross-AZ traffic is free (as opposed to $0.02/GB at AWS); a huge win for certain use cases. They're using a open, platform agnostic "specification" (the Fn Project[2]) for serverless cloud functions, which is wonderful for local dev and test. Terraform is tier 1 with OCI; from documentation through support Terraform is the reference "infrastructure as code" solution on OCI, always comprehensive and robust. Oracle Linux is pretty good; better than Amazon Linux has been, although with AL2023 Amazon is starting to close the gap. OCI instance shapes are very flexible. Overall costs are lower; Oracle is aggressively competing on price. Instance live migration (à la KVM live migrate) is a thing at OCI, so Oracle can live migrate running instances to isolate failing hardware.

I could go on.

Yes, I'd say OCI isn't as stable as AWS. Anecdotally: I get occasional "event notification" in my inbox; perhaps 4 in roughly 2 years, which is fewer (1) than I've seen from AWS in the same time. All but 1 was tangential, didn't actually impact anything that matters, and were quickly resolved. I actually received the OCI notice in my email today before it popped up on HN, which is "different" than how it usually goes with AWS.

[1] My experience is limited to AWS and OCI. [2] https://fnproject.io/

p.s. I appreciate that Oracle has earned the hate it receives from most, and I too have been a victim in my prehistoric past. OCI is, however, different; it's a pay-as-you-go platform that provides Oracle with no customer-abuse opportunities given the strength of the competitors, and my experience with it has been entirely cromulent.

[remram]

They have a good free tier: ARM Ampere instance with 24 GB memory.

[space_ghost]

I snagged one of those as soon as they were available. And, so far, I've only used it to host my portfolio, which is entirely static. :D

[yabones]

I abuse mine to run a big-ass Elasticsearch instance with about a year of syslogs/weblogs for my personal machines. Not terribly useful, but a good outlet for my hoarding I suppose.

[natrys]

Even in pay as you go they have it much cheaper than in azure or gcp.

[chesiffon]

I use Oracle for certain workloads because their ARM compute offering is very flexible and cost effective. They let you select CPU count and memory semi-separately, without charging a huge premium for it. You can have 64 CPUs and 64 GB RAM (max CPU, min RAM) or 1 CPU and 64 GB RAM (min CPU, max RAM). I say "semi-separately" because they don't allow less than 1 GB RAM or more than 64 GB per CPU. For the workloads I'm talking about, they need a lot of RAM compared to CPUs. So Oracle's offering is very attractive for it. I've also found that the CPUs significantly outperform even "high performance" dedicated Intel CPUs at other providers for one of my compute heavy workloads (I still don't understand how that could be the case, but I'll take it). It only underperforms my desktop i7-11700k by about 25%.

[bastard_op]

Anyone stupid enough to enter into Oracle licensing for ERP and financials in the first place simply moves to it eventually as Microsofties inevitably move to Azure. In the name of "better" native integration, ie it sucks less as at least Oracle knows how bad Oracle is to deal with.

Doesn't make it better, just makes for vasoline to make the shagging less painful.

[nray]

You'll care about it if you can't pay for you coffee at Starbucks or whatever. I'm not if there is overlap between Oracle's public cloud and their own hosted services, but a lot of hospitality runs on Oracle (formerly Micros Fidelio) Simphony, and they are moving their customers from on-prem to Oracle Cloud.

[heavyset_go]

It's cheaper than AWS and has a good free tier. I've worked with clients who use it because Oracle or they got a really good deal with them over AWS.

It's not something I'd choose right away, but there are use cases where it can be cheaper/free compared to other options.

[lcenjoyer]

Oracle's vendor lock-in should be given its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

[cypress66]

I use it because it's much cheaper.

Bandwidth alone is an order of magnitude cheaper than AWS.

[BryantD]

Hosted Oracle database services. Otherwise, very favorable contract terms.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Thanks very much, was assuming they must be giving a sweetheart deal given that AWS and GCP have hosted Oracle DB solutions, and even Oracle itself touts running on Azure, https://www.oracle.com/cloud/azure/oracle-database-for-azure....

[hamburglar]

I just read a claim in the Wall Street Journal the other day that said Elon Musk supposedly just bought up their entire available fleet of GPU instances.

Edit: adding link [1] sorry for the paywall

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ai-boom-runs-on-chips-but-i...