Oracle promises SLAs that halve Amazon's cloud costs Oracle chair and chief technology officer has pledged to undercut Amazon Web Services pricing by 50 per cent for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, in part by increasing use of automation. Big Red staged a Cloud event on Tuesday, at which Ellison said that the primary cost of running platform-as-a-service ( …
So there is to be no unplanned downtime, in other words, he is promising perfection.
This is IT, we all know that there will be glitches and unplanned downtime, if only because of some fat-fingered bungling at a critical point.
But of course, he's just the marketing mouthpiece. Marketing has never been there to be realistic.
I plan to change light bulbs (which is why I keep spares). That doesn't imply that I have the slightest idea which bulb is going to blow or when, but I do know that I can change any bulb in less than thirty minutes.
Eliminating "unplanned downtime" via semantics is easy: all you need is a contingency plan and all contingencies become "planned", by definition ;)
Nor will idiot directors ask "What kind of company is Oracle?"
Remember when Oracle made their employee sign a binding arbitration clause, and then lost in their own kangaroo court, so Oracle then sues their kangaroo court to have the decision reversed. Even if Oracle gave away any of its services free for 1 year and then promised to always be cheaper than competition, I still wouldn't do business with them. There are few companies that delight in punching puppies and kicking kittens, and Oracle is one of them. There are things more important than costs.
Oracle DBAs demand a high salary because of the bizarre and unusual installation and maintenance practices necessary to run their products, and they love it because it keeps them on the gravy train. In turn, they do their best to keept their employers locked into Big Red.
Seems like Larry is now biting the hand that feeds it!
"...they love it because it keeps them on the gravy train."
Nice. I personally love being a DBA because there's never dull moment, there's always something being demanded of the system that wasn't anticipated. Sure I get paid good money but I only get paid what the market will stand. You could say the same for Javascript, it's probably got less keywords than ZX Spectrum BASIC or even bog standard C but make it "sing and dance" is still a skill that people learn how to do and the better they do it the more they should be paid. There will always be cowboys in any line of work, those who simply coast along and apply no real thought to what they do, they have no passion and they take the money and damage the reputation of others but not everyone is like that, some of us still believe passionately about IT and enjoy the daily challenge of problem solving.
Sure Oracle software CAN be complicated but it's not really any more complicated than SQL Server or MySQL. I would say, through bitter experience, that install Sharepoint and Exchange are far more hideous than anything Oracle sells, SP and EX are a minefield of patch requirements, anyone who looks after those deserves damn good pay! With Oracle tou run an install script like any other software and out of the box it works, just like any other software. Like Windows, like SQL Server, like OSX, like iOS, like MySQL...note I said works, I never said works well. At that point you pay someone who knows how to make it work properly. Every product works out of the box, very few don't these days and if you weren't that demanding about it you could just leave it as is and just use it. The issue comes when people demand a huge bang for their buck, that's when you need someone to tune it and tweak it.
I really don't see any innovation here; managed services that don't require patching have been around on proper clouds for years.
PAYG charging with no commitment to any particular service? Yep, that's how AWS and (especially) Google Cloud work.
The only thing I see here is a tease about some new db with high availability. Okay, that's great Laz, but Google's Spanner is already here and does all that PAYG, auto-patching, zero maintenance stuff.
This is 2017, Larry. Come on.
which, incidently, is exactly, what Oracle did in back in January by eliminating the core licensing factor (CLF) for cloud offerings. This basically doubled the license cost for every cloudy vCore.
So "half the cost of AWS" today just means "same license cost as physical hosting", obviously.
But I must agree, if Larry tells the story, it sounds better :-)
One of the major worries around moving work to other people's computers is lock in - it's bloody difficult to replatform a deployed application and you need to retune everything.
You would have to be certifiably insane to tie yourself to Oracle with their reputation unless you were already so committed to their DB that leaving was unthinkable.
So we all spectated for years, with a growing sense of tedious inevitability, as Marissa Mayer made one predictable screwup after another and Yahoo circled ever closer to the drain. Only the company's PR machine seemed unware, pretending blissful ignorance of what was obvious to the rest of the world.
I can't help feeling we are somewhere in that cycle with Oracle. It's struggling for relevance, hampered by the well-earned baggage of decades of arrogance, appalling sales and marketing ethics, extortionate over-pricing and the little-mentioned fact that, for most of Oracle's history after its first decade, there have always been better products at better prices.
For those who know anything of the company—and I'm guessing lots of IT decision makers view the company with no fondness whatever—the questions are "So what?", "Why on Earth would we trust you?", "We've already figured out the cloud is more expensive, less reliable and less secure than the saleslizards claimed" ...
... followed by "You missed the bus", "We're now trapped by our existing provider, whose marketurds and lawyers turned out to be way cleverer than our guys" and "Please go away and die quietly".
I agree, I think we are seeing an HP/Yahoo style endgame starting for Oracle; good riddance.
I work in technical presales and almost without exception, customers ask "How can we get off Oracle", "Whats the path"... primarily due to to cost reduction but also a strong dislike of their practices; they no longer offer value. And these are major $bn corporations not single workloads. Oracle cloud is dead before it has even started, these claims Larry makes are laughable.
I think at some point, Oracle will provide badged PaaS DB services thru Azure or AWS, possibly by their own cloud with DirectConnect/ExpressRoute style connectivity. Yes I know RDS and such like does it, but I could see them providing some sort of "Oracle Managed/Supported" arrangement a bit like the Hosted VMWare arrangement on AWS. They will have to, just like VMWare did in order to cling for life.
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Larry has a well earned reputation for spouting utter bollocks that his sales droids have to repeat and the dev techies have to deliver, it's no great surprise Larry was best mates with Steve Jobs, another seriously psychotic bullshitter.
Oracle cloud will be cheaper, hmm, sure Larry! The second you realise that guy down the road ( Azure, Goolge, CouchDB, MongoDB, Hadoop, etc ) is making more money, you'll put the prices up faster than a whippet with a bum full of dynamite. You're the same as Virgin and Sky, get through the door on a short-term, cut-price contract, and just like the classic drug-dealer once they're hooked, jack up the prices 'cos you know you're the only game in town for them.
We weren't born yesterday Larry mate!
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