Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/oracle-is-said-to-lead-anti-amazon-lobby-on-pentagon-cloud-bid

by us0r • 8 years ago

127 127 8 years ago

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.

LarrysNeighbor• 8 years ago

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

manigandham9• 8 years ago

- 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 Starting an instance may take minutes or hours, and they have outdated images for anything not Oracle Linux.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.

sfifs• 8 years ago

Took us a month to get our data out because there's apparently no offline data copy option available from their data center.

Crontab• 8 years ago

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

gaius2• 8 years ago

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

provost• 8 years ago

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?

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

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

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

jayonsoftware• 8 years ago

Ever been to DMV ?

kss238• 8 years ago

Counterpoint: USPS is cheaper than any other carrier for me.

Spooky233• 8 years ago

Almost all states are using outsourced DMV in a can solutions that really suck.

ams61103• 8 years ago

For the most part, they don't know how to do it, and people who are good at it have better opportunities than government jobs

jethro_tell• 8 years ago

It just takes a lot of people and experience to do that. There are a few companies out there that can are already set up well for that. I don't know if I'd put Oracle in that list but Amazon isn't the only one with the experience.

toomuchtodo4• 8 years ago

At US government scale, they’d come out ahead if executed by the US Digital Service (no politics, executed rapidly). Amazon has outrageous margins on AWS, margins that could be better spent by the government on equipment and technical talent.

Ideally, they’d contribute to OpenStack through such an initiative, ensuring an open source alternative to commercial closed cloud providers.

I don’t want my tax dollars going towards Bezo’s attempts at a retail and cloud computing monopoly, but that’s just me. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for Trump considering his disdain for Bezos and the USDS being part of the Executive Office of the President.

valarauca1• 8 years ago

For the same reason any consumer of cloud services would.

Building data centers is expensive and on-demand compute is nice

toomuchtodo4• 8 years ago

It cost the US government $20 billion for air conditioning alone during the Iraq war. A data center is a rounding error.

On demand compute is nice for startups, but overly expensive for mature organizations.

jjirsa• 8 years ago

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).

FLUX-YOU• 8 years ago

Seeing how the F-35 worked out, maybe they should consider it

jknoepfler• 8 years ago

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

lsaferite• 8 years ago

Wouldn't the better comparison be if they just rented the planes from the manufacturer though? Or even better, have a 3rd party company buy and maintain the aircraft and they just rented the aircraft from them. What could go wrong?

mtgx• 8 years ago

Especially when stuff like this tends to happen a lot with AWS:

https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-inscom

manigandham9• 8 years ago

The US government outsources everything. Anything actually being produced or operated is done by some vendor on a government contract, with the big exception of the military (which still has plenty of outsourced business).

Government IT expertise is not high-quality and will never match what AWS has. It's about value, not cost. It's better to have reliable and scalable infrastructure even if AWS is vastly more expensive.

colek422• 8 years ago

They can't afford the technical talent on the GS scales and are unable grow it internally.

r00fus• 8 years ago

Because this country was built on privatized everything.

pessimizer• 8 years ago

Steering contracts is the way you convert political power into personal wealth.

oneplane2• 8 years ago

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.

sherminfermin• 8 years ago

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.

bobthepanda• 8 years ago

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".

oneplane2• 8 years ago

Knowing that AWS vs. Oracle means AWS wins comes from clicking around in the interface and using the API for a few minutes. Even if Oracle was free it would not be worth the pain.

ams61103• 8 years ago

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.

larkeith• 8 years ago

In my experience, Oracle's been doing a wonderful job at spreading their current reputation beyond the smaller developers community.

robbyt• 8 years ago

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

ams61103• 8 years ago

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.

sheepmullet• 8 years ago

I love oracle db and so do lots of dbas.

itronitron2• 8 years ago

oracle is completely unable to create an application that shows anything other than a database table or tables, yet all of their sales are targeted to business users not DBAs.

chris_wot• 8 years ago

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

diebir• 8 years ago

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.

abledon3• 8 years ago

Would it be possible that when the old guard die or retire at oracle a new guard would be more open and similar to Microsoft’s new stance on open source ?

Spooky233• 8 years ago

No. Oracle is all about delivering minimal viable product to institutional customers.

gary__2• 8 years ago

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

coredog646• 8 years ago

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

leoleung• 8 years ago

Gary, we're working on publishing database numbers. In the meantime, we've made our compute and storage numbers public, in addition to the test suites we used, so you can reproduce the testing if desired. https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/high-performan...

icegreentea2• 8 years ago

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.

anoncoward12343• 8 years ago

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!

jeffbarr• 8 years ago

Happy to help - there are plenty of open positions on the AWS team!

AnonCoward222• 8 years ago

Hey thanks for the kind words, I sent you an email. Have a great weekend!

rosstex• 8 years ago

I was expecting "Happy to answer any questions you have!", but this was a refreshing twist. Hoping for the best bud.

pram• 8 years ago

Yeah I worked in PDIT on some of the cloud stuff and it was a sad joke. Get out, you won’t regret it.

devbetadud• 8 years ago

I'm having the same experience with Azure after coming from AWS.

halbritt4• 8 years ago

Ditto. Kinda.

I moved a lot of infra out of AWS and into GKE which I'm loving. Outside of GKE, which is great. GCP has a few things that I like better than AWS.

I also moved some infra into Azure, specifically into ACS, and then AKS and now ACS-engine.

It is very much not great.

setquk• 8 years ago

You sound exactly like the two oracle engineers I spoke to circa 2000. “We hate WebDB. If you don’t buy it, we’ll get made redundant and can sign on and get free education to do something other than IT. Please don’t buy it. Think of our children”.

I exaggerate but not by much.

pubg• 8 years ago

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.

anoncoward12343• 8 years ago

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.

jlgaddis• 8 years ago

... but am curious to know if there is an actual problem, or if this is simply a hater-ade/fanboy party with no substance.

You've never had to deal with Oracle sales or "support" staff or -- even worse -- manage or support Oracle products in production, have you? If you had, well, you would already know the answer. Oracle RDBMS might be the one exception.

(FWIW, I mean "real" Oracle products, not, say, MySQL or Oracle Linux, for example.)

manigandham9• 8 years ago

The Oracle cloud is available to anyone and comes with $300 of credit: https://cloud.oracle.com/home

Ignore the comments and just try it. Run an instance for a weekend, try to setup a site or install a DB and see how it goes. I think you'll learn very quickly why the reputation exists.

christophilus• 8 years ago

Amazon's AWS team probably contacts me once a month with job offers. I suspect you could reach out to them and get yourself a much better job. My friend who works for them loves it.

halbritt4• 8 years ago

I've a friend up in Washington that loves it. That said, I've worked with a lot of ex-AWS people that couldn't stand the culture.

PenguinCoder• 8 years ago

I've been contacted and interviews a few times with AWS and threat Intel team but never got ANY followup after the second interview. It's disheartening. At this point I'm ready to give up. Why do their recruiters keep reaching out If they never even give a Yay /nay after six months and two interviews?

emmelaich2• 8 years ago

I've heard IBM's Cloud is much the same.

The only thing it has in common with a proper cloud thing like AWS or GCP is the 'cloud' in the name.

coredog646• 8 years ago

Isn't IBM's cloud offering built on top of Cloud Foundry? (Not saying you are wrong, just trying to figure out which partner is to blame)

notananthem• 8 years ago

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

suyash• 8 years ago

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.

aidos• 8 years ago

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

https://youtu.be/KmXJSeMaoTY

youdontknowtho5• 8 years ago

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.

manigandham9• 8 years ago

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.

haimez• 8 years ago

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.

youdontknowtho5• 8 years ago

Oh my god. I get it. You like Amazon. Sorry, I'm just more cynical than I think allows me to be polite at times. I'm really not trying to be rude.

I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it.

The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.

rdl3• 8 years ago

Amazon is sometimes less than perfect, but they operate in hypercompetitive markets where customers can easily switch away. This builds an entirely different kind of company than an Oracle or a big defense contractor. Fundamentally CIA and DOD cloud requirements aren't that different from large existing AWS workloads so it's nearly the existing COTS product. (There's a bit of security on top, some of which is better in commercial AWS than in most locked-down S/TS environments already, some of which can be retrofitted onto AWS easily, and much of which is just policy, but the rest of the product is basically already fine.)

I would trust an arbitrary product which competes on the marketplace and is sold into government on a COTS basis more than virtually anything arising out of government/vendor insanity. (I'd probably go with a purely-Government solution if it were a really specialized thing and of small enough scale, developed organically by the end user org, more than a traditional procurement thing, but COTS generally is the winner whenever a COTS option exists.)

youdontknowtho5• 8 years ago

If you think that Amazon got where it has in government because of competition, I have a bridge to sell you. That's not how business is done in the public sector. It's just not. Years of legislation have built massive systems of patronage that must be satisfied no matter what service or system you provide.

"Trust a product"...that's part of the problem right there. Why do we have to trust them? It's just weird how emotion becomes part of this. I'm not trying to single you out or anything. I do it too, reflexively.

I guess my point is that the only difference between Oracle and Amazon are some letters in the name and some circumstances. If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same way under a different set of circumstances, then you are going to be let down.

Maybe I'm just rambling...I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the IT industry and American business in general. It's all just so incredibly short sighted.

mrep2• 8 years ago

To me, amazon has earned a reputation for being extremely customer friendly, consistently working to drive down prices, and funneling all of their cash flows into R&D/growth.

Idk about you, but those are probably the top 3 attributes I want in a company that manages my infrastructure.

youdontknowtho5• 8 years ago

If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same manner under different circumstances, you are in for a let down. They are a business, Oracle is doing what's "right for their shareholders". They all behave this way.

fibers• 8 years ago

People hate Oracle because they hate competition.

colek422• 8 years ago

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

davesque• 8 years ago

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.... The only things Trump understands are money and favors.

tboyd47• 8 years ago

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

mrb• 8 years ago

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".

astura2• 8 years ago

I see you aren't familiar with the DoD's (non-critical) infrastructure. Self hosted services go down for not insignificant periods of time not infrequently. Half the time if something goes down and the wrong person is out of the office, it doesn't get fixed until they come back.

I think fragmentation is the problem.

(Disclaimer: I've been out of the defense contracting business for some time)

ocdtrekkie• 8 years ago

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.

coredog646• 8 years ago

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.

gameswithgo• 8 years ago

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

fapjacks• 8 years ago

Oh, of course Oracle is doing that, seizing on Trump's weird attack. Oracle the trash company. Surprise, surprise.

s2g• 8 years ago

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

sounds reasonable.

hueving3• 8 years ago

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.

jshaqaw• 8 years ago

Drain the swamp indeed.

billsmithaustin• 8 years ago

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

Oracle Said to Be Leading Anti-Amazon Lobby on Pentagon Cloud Bid

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