[boberoni]

Anyone have experience with Oracle Cloud and ease of moving away?

This benchmark seems to recommend Oracle Cloud, but I’ve heard that Oracle has historically used aggressive licenses and legal terms to keep customers locked-in.

[dkechag]

I wrote the article. I would NEVER tell anyone to use Oracle, as the vendor lock in and strong-arming and pricing is ridiculous. That said, I am hosting small projects on Oracle Cloud, due to the super low cost. I can just move them whenever they decide to be naughty, I am not using an oracle DB or anything proprietary, just linux VMs with my own mysql setup.

[olalonde]

I was confused by your comment. I assume you meant to say "I would NEVER tell anyone to use Oracle DB" (as opposed to Oracle Cloud)?

[esseph]

I would never let a friend use Oracle anything. Oracle is a predator.

[speed_spread]

But is a lawnmower a predator to the grass?

[dkechag]

I meant pretty much anything Oracle... except their free/cheap VMs :)

[Aurornis]

I signed up for an Oracle Cloud trial. They closed my trial a few days later and shut down my one trial VM without warning.

Weirdly they didn’t allow me to add payment info to continue. Even weirder their sales people kept contacting me asking me to come back. When I explained the situation they all tried to fix it and then went radio silent until the next sales rep came along to try to convince me to stay.

I searched Reddit at the time and a lot of other people had the same experience. A lot of other people were bragging about abusing their free tier and trials without consequences. I still don’t know how they decided to permanently close my account (without informing the sales team)

[dkechag]

I had a bit of a hard time when I first signed up. It turns out the problem was I had included "oracle" in my email (I give a different email on my domain to every provider), so some part of the system considered it an internal email and others part did not, so I had a weird account that could not do anything. Took them a month of two to figure out what was wrong...

[12345ieee]

I've been using it professionally for years.

As long as you don't use their exclusive DBaaS, moving away is easier than from other places, as egress traffic is free.

The user experience though, stuff of nightmares...

[XCSme]

I used their free tier.

The account creation process was really confusing, and they kept turning off my instance because usage was not high enough.

It seemed quited oudated/confusing to use last time I tried it a few years ago.

[chrismorgan]

This has made me leery of Oracle Cloud in the past. https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...:

> Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true:

> • CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 20%

> • Network utilization is less than 20%

> • Memory utilization is less than 20% (applies to A1 shapes only)

The stupid but presumably effective solution is to waste resources to keep above those limits.

Another solution is offered by the email multiple sources cite they send when they reclaim (or warn they will reclaim? not clear) an instance:

> You can keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources remains within the Always Free limits.

[dkechag]

They warn they will reclaim. I had two accounts, one processing data for a free weather service I volunteer for, so it's not idle and has had no issues for a couple of years now. The other for personal projects, so at times it stays idle for a while and I would get these email warnings which made me switched it to paid. I have not paid a cent, again for a couple of years now.

[syncordie]

We moved about 400 VMs across AWS and GCP to Oracle Cloud spead across 4 regions. Our approach was to first move our applications to rely only on Load Balancers, Block/Object Storage and Compute from the cloud. No RDS, BigQuery etc. This required a slight increase in SREs/DevOps resources.

Once we did this, the move was fairly easy (the exception being having to write our own auto-scaling logic as the built-in one is very limited). Overall we reduced our cloud spend (even accounting for the additional staff) by about 40%. Bandwidth is practically free and you are not limited to specific combos of CPU/RAM (so you can easily provision something with 7 cores and 9 GB RAM). Another big factor for us was that compute costs in OCI don't vary by region.

I will not recommend using any other managed services from OCI besides the basics (we tried some and they are not very reliable). We've seen minor issues in Networking periodically (Private DNS, LBs or interconnectivity between compute instances), but overall I would say the switch has been worth it.

[acedTrex]

Everytime i have to login to oracle cloud i strongly wish i was not logging into oracle cloud...

[sqircles]

They'll find one way or another to laugh all the way to the bank, that is for sure.