I've started seeing ads for Oracle OCI in some podcasts I listen to so I think they are starting to see if they can attract customers outside of their "enterprise sales process".
I'm not sure who those ads are supposed to appeal to besides the podcasts hosts raking in the ad dollars.
I haven’t seen the ads, but Oracle Cloud is definitely the public cloud provider with the most generous free tier. That’s not to say you should use and trust them, but I can see why many would.
You pay in other ways.
I understand if you have absolutely no money, but even then repeatedly trying to provision a server and getting a error- something like no capacity available - isn't a fun time.
Whatever, I'll pay 7$ a month to not deal with that.
You can automate it using their API and some Python. It's like a puzzle game and I'm personally thankful for the free tier, it's pretty cool if you max it out you have multiple IPv4 addresses, IPv6 prefixes and so on - the machines boot via UEFI, you can run nixos and ZFS on them, you have a serial console via ssh/vnc and at least in Germany they have good connectivity and 10tb Traffic is plenty. Using it for something serious? Probably not. But for tinkering it's pretty cool and interesting if you enjoying some small quests. Running incus and some Kubernetes stuff on an arm box and 24gb memory and 200gb SSD is at least 10-20€ elsewhere.
I had a script calling their apis to setup one of their free arm instances after I deleted the one I had to change the OS (something I had done before).
After running every hour for several months I gave up (always out of capacity and it was impossible to change the region on free tier back then). They either had a bug that still showed my account as using the deleted resources or no capacity, both which seem out of place in a “cloud” infrastructure.
My personal multicloud strategy for many years was to make full use of the free tier on as many providers as necessary.
Making a cloud provider that just wraps other providers' free tiers would be a fun challenge.
>”enterprise sales process”
I’m sorry, is Oracle known to be some super sleazy sales org that plys enterprise decision makers with strippers and cocktails, and drugs?
I have absolutely no idea if you are being facetious or naive there.
Yes. Oracle is absolutely the tech vendor that's going to be dropped on the engineering team with zero input and no consideration for whether it fits the problems they have, after your CTO spends a a few days on the golf course and high end steak restaurants and, depending on how much money their enterprise sales team thinks they have, either high class escorts or sleazy strip joints. Given how common that story (or one very like it) is, I'm close to 100% certain those trips also include discreet photographers and hotel rooms wired with 4k video recording.
> I have absolutely no idea if you are being facetious or naive there.
Neither, but perhaps worse: I am young.
Are there any compilations of apocryphal stories of the events you described? It sounds too fantastic to be real.
Yes that sort of stuff happens all the time in the business side of things. There’s a reason it’s a trope.
Not to every company per se but it’s been commonplace well probably for as long as business itself has been.
Just an example - nothing that happened in wolf of wall street was original to them - just the getting famous for being caught part. And that was only a few decades ago.
The defense and finance industries are famous for that sort of thing. I’m sure it’s pervasive elsewhere too.
There’s nothing special about software or tech or clouds that makes schmoozing impossible.
It would be like people compiling stories of eating a sandwich. No one is doing it because of how unremarkable and common it is.
Many have written about Gavrilo Princip’s trip to the cafe - if the sandwich has sufficient intrigue and scandal around it, people will write (and read) about it.
OK, but this one is a pretty funny rebuttal:
> In 2000, Oracle attracted attention from the computer industry and the press after hiring private investigators to dig through the trash of organizations [...] When asked how he would feel if others were looking into Oracle's business activities, Ellison said: "We will ship our garbage to Redmond, and they can go through it. We believe in full disclosure."
> [...] I'm close to 100% certain those trips also include discreet photographers and hotel rooms wired with 4k video recording.
Luckily, AI is about to make that particular tactic ineffective:
When you can deepfake any video evidence, the original becomes useless.
This is legitimately the first time I have ever seen it brought up too! I’ve never heard about this side of them.
Universally hated, but the legal aspects alone are hateworthy.