Oracle cloud has the most generous free tier ever. I've got a 24GB ram VPS on it that I have run a minecraft server on for the last year. Never paid a dollar for it.
Yes, and they’re notorious for rejecting credit cards. They can also shut down your machines at any time if paying users want more capacity. I moved off after they killed my machine and caused me to lose a bunch of data because I couldn’t spin up another (capacity full)
@quinnypig's tone[1] wears on me a bit. I don't mean that in judgement, we all suffer from followers disease[2]. I just don't like the effort of having to parse through the tone of everything to figure out what's actually going on.
For instance, here, the original B2B tech company, still turning over billions upon billions, wouldn't provide the base unit of B2B tech?
Really?
Interrobang of surprise at that?
I don't think so. You'd have to be very young and made 0 effort into ex. checking IBM's business metrics over the course of your lifetime.
[1] my current standard for this is "how long would you feel people were talking about your efforts accurately, if they talked the same way you do?" -- standards are leaky and hard to word.
[2] The Algorithm has multiple tentacles, you end optimizing for your most engaging behavior
They bought a ton of adtech companies (primarily data providers) in the 2010ish range. As one of my former colleagues said, "the lawyers at Oracle considered cookies to be on-prem software" which says a lot about Oracle's view of advertising. If you're really successful, you either become a media company, a bank, or a consulting firm. Oracle is firmly #3 while companies like Apple figured out how to become a media company and a bank. Though it's a little early to claim "figure out" I suppose.
Mostly due to acquisitions, they own a huge range of business applications, both generic (such as Peoplesoft and NetSuite) and industry-specific (e.g. Cerner in healthcare). These kinds of apps tend to have high lock-in: once your business is running on one or more of them, migrating to something else can be an expensive megaproject.
Also, historically they had a big push for their apps to use their own tech products (DB and middleware), so the tech side of the business benefited from the apps side. Although, I remember when I worked there (6+ years ago), they were trying to move away from that somewhat, and cloud apps teams in particular were being given more freedom to use whatever technology they thought was best for their product rather than forced to adopt Oracle Whatever. Plus, acquired products run on all kinds of different tech stacks, since (at least my personal impression was) the tech stack wasn’t a huge concern in deciding what to acquire
It doesn't. Opower was founded, under that name, in 2007. Oracle acquired it in 2016. Any suggestions the O in its name stands for "Oracle" are a retcon founded on a coincidence
I think they offer a lot of niche-market products that all sort of work together as a "suite" with the core product of course the db. I work in the utility industry and they are present everywhere.
Of the products I'm immediately aware of, they have a billing data system, a meter data system, and an enterprise asset management system. They try to sell upper management that all components work together easily, and because IT is not our core business, this is an enticing pitch to the chief level audience.
Consulting fees for said DB and escalating DB licensing costs. They have an atrocious reputation and I'm honestly amazed they invest as little into training sessions/cold call advertising as they do.
We use Oracle's Grapeshot (they acquired them in 2018) which is a solid platform for audience targeting and brand safety for ads.
The product is still working since the news broke this week, and my assumption is they are going to try and sell it on as it's still a solid product and performs wells and brings us nice ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
if you're at the size of needing K8S, you can afford a devops/cloud engineering team.
To OP's point, this seems to be a trend among corporate blogs. Targeting devs with irrelevant content. A few weeks back I remember seeing a "SOC 2 for devs" blog article and was really scratching my head. That's not the level that devs work at, at all. If you're paying six figure salaries to devs to sit around all day worrying about overweight bureaucratic nonsense, or other tasks way beyond their expertise, then you're doing it wrong. I'm guessing these orgs think devs has some decision making influence or perhaps it looks good for recruiting? Or maybe they just want that HN juice. What next, I wonder? Neurosurgery for devs?
No. Kubernetes is extremely valuable to small orgs. Google Kubernetes Engine is pretty much fire & forget. You turn it on, set the maintenance window and it just works. It also saves you from having to reinvent health checks, ingresses, etc. It's actually less work than maintaining plain old servers when you factor in maintenance, and since state is immutable you don't run into issues where some developer fixed an issue 3 years ago and no one knows why it works.
Having the possibility to test stuff locally using e.g. minikube. Also in general we just build everything around docker containers. Doesn't matter if they run locally on a dev machine or in a gke cluster.
