Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

[corkhead]

Does anyone have any experience of this at all?

I didn’t know oracle did this either…

The company I work for has just made the switch from azure to aws and now to oracle cloud infrastructure all in the last 7 months. In short, oracle is cheaper to lift and shift all the older stuff we have.

Am I right to be worried? Seems like the short term financial gain will hurt the long term plans for our cloud native saas platform. Even though we aren’t locked in to oracle today or plan to use anything oracle specific..

 

[peterwalkley]

Depends how your budgets work. Can money saved on keeping the legacy day to day stuff running be used for the development work needed for moving to cloud native ?

Sounds like you already know how to avoid the lock-in from the technical side, where you could come unstuck is the commercials ... Oracle can be very good at keeping business long term by selling at levels way above us techie peasant pay grades

 

[corkhead]

We are told that the money saved will go into the replatform. Obviously that could change.

The leadership were essentially sold the dream. Lift and shift what you have and save lots of money and ooo look we have a gen 2 cloud.

Problem is I can’t find any sort of dev community for oci. So forget any 3rd party implementations for something like a serilog sink etc.. we would have to implement all that and support it ourselves. Plus whatever gaps the cloud itself may have. Stackoverflow survey shows just how little use it gets, it’s nothing..

This is all stuff we will only realise when we are knee deep into it.

I realise you can sort of code for any cloud but when it comes down to it you have to pick an sdk or lib to use for config, storage, vaults, or terraform for certain resources, alert in the log service.. all that stuff etc. Of course it’s interfaced but being able to move clouds isn’t just a switch to flick.

I’m also selfishly worried that oci just won’t be as good for my career as azure or aws. When I joined I was told it was an azure migration.

A mate of mine works for sales force with their bespoke tech stack and they have to inflate the salaries to keep their devs. So would that eat into the money saved… ughh..

 

[planty]

Am I reading it right? You've switched from azure to aws, and now they're switching from aws to oracle? All in 7 months?

I would share all the concerns you have mentioned, have you raised them with "the leadership"? When you say they were sold the dream, how much input did the technical side of the business have on this decision?

 

[corkhead]

Before covid, there was a decision to create a cloud native saas platform in azure (this is what drew me in in the first place). I had a lot of dev experience with one of the apps in their large suite already (they bought a version of the source for it).

Since there is a lot of legacy stuff in data centres, it meant taking those apps and "lifting and shifting" them into the cloud (Azure VMs). A lot of them would stay that way as they don't get changed much, but the ones that are still in active dev would be re-platformed (rewrite) to be cloud native over time. One new app, and a couple of the existing apps in the company were being re platformed before I started and continued while I've been here (again, all in azure - these will most likely stay there).

To assist with this, they hired a consultancy company (consisting of dev/infrastructure resource, project managers etc) to assist the existing teams in the migration, training on cloud development etc and to create the the new app.

But then after being there ~2 months, this consultancy company and all its resource were binned off. I think the costs of this consultancy were becoming too high because this happened quite quickly. They have been replaced but with no dev resource, only consultant architects.

The leadership then had meetings with MS and AWS and chose AWS as the cloud provider. Bit of a shock for a .net shop, but ok.. Then a further 2 months later, we are told that Oracle has been chosen as the cloud platform.

Since i've only been there 7 months (im in the Technical Architects team but not a senior member of staff) I was not involved in these meetings and i'm not sure how much tech input there was. Oracle basically told the company that they would handle the lift and shift for the deadline and that they would be cheaper than aws/azure (aws/azure couldn't match the price oracle quoted).

I have raised my concerns over what this will mean for app dev, but the decision appears to already be made based on the cost alone and my gut feeling is to consider going elsewhere. I don't know if that's an overreaction..

 

[El Pew]

Problem is I can’t find any sort of dev community for oci. So forget any 3rd party implementations for something like a serilog sink etc.. we would have to implement all that and support it ourselves. Plus whatever gaps the cloud itself may have. Stackoverflow survey shows just how little use it gets, it’s nothing..

I’m also selfishly worried that oci just won’t be as good for my career as azure or aws. When I joined I was told it was an azure migration.

If it helps there is a pretty generous free tier for OCI, you get £250 in credits to use in the first month and then there is the 'always free tier' - this has some limitations which mean you can't use as much of their headline stuff as you'd thinkg, but you can run two ARM64 machines with a total of 4 vCPUs and 24GB of RAM plus a load balancer for free forever (or until Larry decides he needs a new island, anyway). This means you can have a pretty good sandbox environment to get your hands dirty.

Aside from that you're probably right to be wary as OCI is way behind the big three (AWS, Azure, GCP) in terms of adoption, but there are definitely things which are transferable across all of these plus OCI as well. Compute, storage, network, load balancing etc are all very similar across all the cloud platforms, and you just need to familiarise yourself with the different terminology. But to give you an example I've developed a Kubernetes native app which I run on AWS (EKS), Azure (AKS), OCI (OKE) and on-premises bare metal K8S clusters and the differences between the cloud platforms are fairly minimal. I actually think OCI was probably the easiest of the three to implement, it feels a lot simpler to stand up and configure - way easier than bare metal.

In general Oracle is a strange beast to work with - they seem to like making things unnecessarily complicated but in career terms Oracle technologies tend to by higher paying, if a bit niche (outside of their database tech).

 

[Throrik]

In general Oracle is a strange beast to work with - they seem to like making things unnecessarily complicated

Like their licensing, pricing and contracts