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Comment by art-vandelay | Hacker News Reader

Bad in what sense? Curious because I just signed up for OCI a few hours ago.

It's rough all around the edges:

- Want to mount HD Volumes? You've got to copy/paste a bunch of commands as an additional step after attaching it. This, in addition to the mkfs.xyz and all the normal linux stuff

- You thought AWS pricing was opaque? OCI implemented something called OCPU each of which gives 2 cores, but you've got to go to their 'cost simulator' page to make sense, and even then, there are some of their machine types that are not in the cost calculator

- They offer ARM cpus with their proprietary Oracle Linux... but once in, if you try to install the "oracle arm development toolchain" using their own tutorials, commands and sources, it doesn't work.

- To get into a "pay as you go" plan after your trial finishes you have to dance around in 4 or 5 video/calls with one of their "representatives" so that they move you to "PayPal" payment (for some reason they don't accept cards directly but only Paypal)

- Once I was "moved" to the pay-as-you-go, my Billing chart UI just broke, and suddenly I don't have a way to see how much I am spending (empty charts).

- The "performance levels" of block storage is also weird... and just now they released "ultra high performance", but it cannot be used by any machine, and you also need to do some additional crap to make it work.

- The login is strange.. at some point trying to login, I ended up in some strange Oracle screen that had nothing to do with OCI.

- The "Wordpress appliance" (whatever they call it) that they place at the very front of the screen after you login doesn't work: The admim user/password you enter when setting it up does not work. This one made me laugh... so bad.

And so on, and so forth. There's a lot of other papercuts that we've had while trying it.

If you want to create a couple of instances it is OK, but the brokeness becomes old when you are trying to do something real.

My takeaway as a daily user of OCI and an AWS / GCP customer:

Oracle cloud has proven to be refreshingly nice and easy to work with and develop + manage services on.

AWS is fine but can be costly and has technical baggage.

The cluster mess that is GCP is by far the most frustrating. For starters, the UI is indefensibly terrible.

Curious to know what specific complaints or grievances about OCI folks have.

Disclaimer: I currently work at Oracle, but don't speak on behalf of the company in any capacity. This is all my personal opinion and honest experience. YMMV and that's okay!

p.s. The OCI "free-forever" VMs are pretty generous-

2x instances with 1GB ram, much higher network and compute performance compared to GCP free-tier.

Honestly, looking at Oracle Cloud, I think the best thing they could do is spin off and just completely remove any trace of the name Oracle. You have some absolutely fantastic products that are being criminally neglected because people won't go anywhere near the name, and can you blame them?

I dont even think they need to Spin it off. They could reform it as subsidiary and have a different company name.

In a past company where I was, we were approached by OCI sales team wanting to move us from AWS (we had a partnership with Oracle in other products).

After doing some due diligence, I couldn't find a reason to move anything. I think Oracle has to find something that just excels in their cloud. Shit, even giving free outbound traffic forever would be a huge plus. Microsoft has their AI stack, Google has their Spanner and other propiertary services, AWS has "everything else". But if Oracle wants to really take clients from others, they ought to do something good. I don't think they can compete with the DigitalOcean/Linoe/Vultr class... So unless they have a "killer app" it will be complicated to find customers that want to go through all the hassle of migrating from an existing cloud solution.

> Microsoft has their AI stack

TBH this is better on Google as well. MS has better corporate integration with IT teams that use MS internally.

One advantage is that GraalVM Enterprise Edition is free to use on OCI infrastructure. I have yet to try it, but could be useful for a nice performance boost.

GCP has the worst UI, except for all the others

The last time I tried Google Cloud was to test some Serverless code, this was the outcome:

---

Just spent 2 hours trying to make some basic Google Cloud Services examples of Serverless to work, directly from the Serverless page to no avail. GCS was returning all kind of weird errors, including HTTP 500 ...

After that decided to move to use the AWS examples, and the first one I tried worked like a charm! Google has a long way to go to be at the level of AWS, right now the infrastructure seems crappy, if you cannot even run the most simple examples of a simple HTTP serverless function.

EDIT: Also, I would never use Google Cloud, fearing that if for some reason they decide to "block" my account, I would have no recourse. Their support is terrible as well.

Weird, I use GCP (GCS extensively) pretty much exclusively for numerous different clients and can recall having 0 issues. I had to use AWS EKS recently and found the UX to be quite sub-par in the console compared to GCP. EKS is a nightmare compared to GKE as well.

Yes. EKS is a horrible piece of crap. I've tried it and ended up using ECS.

Agreed... GCP isn't perfect by any means, but I find it much better than AWS, and miles better than Azure.

Aws ui is old school and has clunky ux but is very snappy even on underpowered hw. GCP is a bloated mess. Takes 30-60s to load every page on my personal mac air with a 1gpbs link. And doesn’t work well in safari

It's fixed now, but for a while I had to open the gcp pubsub part of the console in chrome rather than Firefox because it would just completely fail to load.

The cynical part of me was thinking that this is a good way to increase browser market share, but more likely an honest mistake.

Overall I find the gcp console and gcloud cli very user-friendly compared to aws though

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