lucianf's comments

Hardware, software, consulting, research

That is so wrong. Kyndryl is (was) just infrastructure maintenance and consulting. Business services (IBM Consulting) is that ~5B/quarter thing while Kyndryl keeps sinking.

>Linux + Exim + Spamassassin + greylistd + Dovecot + Sieve is all it takes

Obligatory reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Another point re $$$'s. Predictable, low pricing is actually a key Oracle cloud selling point. Following the recent wins with Zoom and 8x8 we've put up a comparison sheet [1] and a workload estimator [2]. Then there's the general cost estimator [3]. No hidden costs, and no calling required.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/economics/

[2] https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/workload-estimator/index.ht...

[3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cost-estimator.html

Er, I'd argue that aiming for safety and/or following the crowd aren't really the ingredients of a sound decision making process. On that basis no challenger would ever stand a chance.

Point taken. Every time Oracle is mentioned it's in the context of horror licensing stories. I get that - but would it make a difference if I said OCI is actually different?

Take this with as much salt as you want but they're really trying to put that in the past. OCI pricing is super transparent, simple metrics, cheaper than the incumbents on every front, there's no "call us for pricing", there's a transparent 30% discount for committed spending (before you even get to talk to a salesperson) and the dev team has been given free reign to act like a startup and ignore the corporate machine. I'm not a marketing person but I do believe we have a very good offering and it's a shame it's being ignored solely because of bad blood.

It does help, there are some early decisions that were made pretty well (the first or second time, at least).

Oracle's EC2 is called "compute instances", S3 "object storage", SES "email delivery", Lambda "functions" etc.

And object storage could have been Casper, load balancer Flamingo, or data transfer Rhino.

Semi-shameless plug (I work for Oracle) but have you tried OCI? You might find both the console UI/UX and the cloud calculator pretty decent. That's just my personal feel, coming over to work as an Oracle cloud consultant with previous AWS/Azure experience. I'd argue it's normal those two are where they are; AWS is now a spaghetti of products, while Microsoft are anti-KISS by DNA.

That's really unfounded, unless you're talking about an experience you had years ago when the platform was still in the early stages.

The current Gen 2 cloud (OCI) is very much capable. I would strongly suggest you either have a high level look at the products available (start here [1]), peruse the documentation [2], or have a go yourself with a free account [3].

Happy to continue this chat about actual products you thought were lacking, or your experience.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ [2] https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/ [3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free

Yes, you can very much take a credit card and use.

There's a free tier [1] which gives you an initial $300 credit for the first 30 days, then if you don't convert to a pay as you go model (absolutely your choice) will drop you to an "always free" tier that gives you a bunch of resources at no cost (2 small VMs, 2 autonomous DBs, 100GB of storage etc.)

For committed spending there is a universal credits model (which comes with a 30% discount by default).

Doesn't cost your soul either - have a look at the price list [2] or run through the cost estimator [3]. Also, some resources are always free (e.g. first 10TB of egress, cloud shell, kubernetes cluster, developer cloud services etc.)

(disclaimer, I work at Oracle)

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ [2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ucpricing.html [3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cost-estimator.html

Care to support that comment please? Mind you, talking about cloud platforms here not parent companies.

Not a salespitch, but Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is built with pretty serious enterprise-grade security in mind. Couple of resources:

[1] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-infrastructu... [2] https://www.oracle.com/assets/oracle-inf-cloud-security-wp-3... [3] https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Security/Co... [4] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/the-four-pilla... [5] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/core-to-edge-s...

I think that's unfair (I may be biased as I work at Oracle) but many people would argue Oracle is well in the top 5 (if you look at global infrastructure and platform, and discount SaaS-only and/or regional vendors).

OCI is also growing very fast (aiming for 36 regions by the end of the year) and adding lots of products beyond basic compute and storage, particularly around cloud native (functions, managed Kubernetes, API gateway), of course database (classic, autonomous, MySQL, NoSQL) plus streaming, events, monitoring email delivery, marketplace etc. And a lot of Oracle products as PaaS (analytics, integration, blockchain etc.)

That's not fair, this is about OCI not the larger Oracle. It's like bashing Azure for what Microsoft has done in the past (funny how we're not hearing much about that anymore).

OCI is cheaper than AWS on pretty much every metric. In this particular context:

"The Reuters article helpfully points out that Zoom has 217,000 terabytes a month of traffic flowing through it. If we assume all of that is from inside of Zoom’s environment out to the internet (it absolutely isn’t, but it’s a fine worst-case data transfer scenario) and all of it is moving to Oracle now that the deal is signed (certainly not happening, but work with me here), according to public pricing that data transfer would cost, per month: $11,186,406.55 on AWS, nobody knows on Azure because the pricing calculator thinks I’m screwing with it when I put that big of a number into it, and $1,843,630 (hat tip to Jeffery Lyon on that; I moved a decimal in an earlier version of this post) on Oracle Cloud."

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle-clo...

(disclaimer, I work at Oracle)

Am I the only one who saw IP mentioned like a hundred times without knowing what it meant?

Read the article in his profile, you'll find your answer in 10 secs. And yeah, with that profile, in that location, I take his point. But not everybody is that lucky :)