
Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid - us0r
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/oracle-is-said-to-lead-anti-amazon-lobby-on-pentagon-cloud-bid
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anoncoward1234
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!

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pubg
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.

~~~
anoncoward1234
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.

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rdl
I wonder if there will be a management witch hunt against the Solutions
Engineering team on Monday provoked by your post.

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stale2002
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.

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userbinator
_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.

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Crontab
Oracle: the company who would ruin the software industry just to win a lawsuit
against Google. Fuck em.

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gaius
Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is
doing.

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provost
> Kicking the crap out of Google in the courts is the one good thing Oracle is
> doing.

Could you elaborate on why this is a good thing?

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manigandham
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.

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LarrysNeighbor
Will you please elaborate? I'm looking to evaluate it myself, and curious to
hear what issues you ran into with it.

~~~
manigandham
\- 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.

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itronitron
a lot of the issues you list would likely be considered desirable features by
DOD standards

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ams6110
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.

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robbyt
Why do you think they never won the hearts of the people who actually had to
use the product?

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ams6110
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.

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enraged_camel
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.

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oneplane
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.

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sherminfermin
> 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.

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bobthepanda
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".

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hueving
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.

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jjeaff
Anytime that the main proficiency of this large organization is not data
center management. Which is most of the time.

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hueving
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.

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youdontknowtho
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.

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manigandham
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.

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haimez
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.

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manigandham
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.

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mrb
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".

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ocdtrekkie
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.

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coredog64
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.

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notananthem
Sounds like Oracle's core business of fucking everyone up for no reason. Larry
you are a true POS <3

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aidos
Cheap, but let’s all enjoy Larry Ellison on “the cloud”

[https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY](https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY)

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ReverseCold
Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc?

I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.

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jjirsa
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).

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jknoepfler
datacenter construction and management is not exactly rocket science in 2018.

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manigandham
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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colek42
Please no, I do not want to use Oracle anything. We are finally starting to
embrace open source in this sector.

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icegreentea2
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.

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chris_wot
I can’t say this often, but I want Amazon to win this deal now.

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gameswithgo
If anyone in the government is reading this, don't go with oracle please. Not
an efficient use of money.

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suyash
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.

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davesque
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...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-silicon-valley-giant-bankrolling-
devin-nunes). The only things Trump understands are money and favors.

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billsmithaustin
Oracle should go straight to the top: buy advertising time on Fox & Friends.

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fapjacks
Oh, _of course_ Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle
the trash company. Surprise, surprise.

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diebir
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.

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gary__
I'm told Oracle's RDBMS has top notch performance at scale - I'd be interested
to hear some informed discussion on the topic.

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coredog64
GLWT. Oracle's legal department aggressively prevents the publishing of
benchmarks. The EULA for any version of the Oracle RDBMS specifically
prohibits releasing benchmarks.

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gary__
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.

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tboyd47
Weird how you never see HN so pro- or anti- a company as when Oracle is
mentioned.

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jshaqaw
Drain the swamp indeed.

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s2g
> Their goal is to make sure that the award process is opened up to more than
> one company

sounds reasonable.

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fibers
People hate Oracle because they hate competition.

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hueving
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.

