I would like to share with you my thoughts on Oracle Cloud as someone who has worked for a partner/customer for many years. I just am so frustrated by using their cloud I need to vent somewhere! That being said, I know that my living at the moment is funded indirectly by Oracle so have to be somewhat careful.
- Buggy - When we have tried different could services, including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services, we have found them to be very buggy - even in provisioning. At times, simple data entry screens take minutes to load. It is clear that the technology used to build their cloud is very outdated - particularly the user interface. We regularly have times where our services are unavailable - mainly PaaS and IaaS and we get error messages (e.g. 500 service not available) and we raise a ticket with Oracle. Eventually, it comes back working, but they NEVER can tell us what the problem was, and the dashboard showing service availability shows green all the time (i.e they do not record the outage). It feels like the software has been rushed out half-finished. It also seems like the consistency between products is non-existant - very much like separate companies have made the products.
- DR is all over the place - there is no consistency. Some services have no DR at all and you cannot do anything about it, others you are responsible for maintaining a DR and it is rudimentary to say the least and I would say next to impossible to reliably operate a DR solution yourself. Oracle will suggest the most bizarre and unacceptable workarounds for this issue. The only area which seems to have some type of build in DR are the SaaS services. However, even with these, you cannot test them, and Oracle gives no assurance or guarantees about anything. Given the state of the rest of their cloud, I would not trust it one bit. If you have multiple services which all need to operate together in the event of a DR event, then you better go and buy a lottery ticket as it is next to impossible to do this with Oracle cloud.
- Outage windows - good luck keeping your systems up all the time! Each service can have different outage/maintenance windows. This means that if your system uses a handful of cloud services (e.g. a mix of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) you will be having outage most weekends! I counted the outage windows on our services last year and 60% of weekends we had maintenance windows for the year for one of our products. Regularly the window would be lengthy - i.e 12 hours plus and also often run over time. They are all on the weekend so if you run your business 5 days per week it might be ok, but if you want your solution up 24x7 you are in big trouble. They will never mention this to you when buying of course - it will be buried in legal documents no-one ever can understand or read.
- Performance - With the SaaS products (at least the 6-8 I have tried out), they are excruciatingly slow - to a level that it is embarrassing. Oracle in their demos always blame the internet connection and pretend that something seems wrong unexpectedly or say it's just a demo system and the real one is way faster. Let me tell you, they are so slow all the time your users will be mortified. It is like watching paint dry - even for production systems. I don't have enough data to comment on PaaS/IaaS but clearly the SaaS stuff has so much inefficiency when they built it I am not sure what they can do apart from a rewrite.
- Integration - Oracle suggests all the time in their flashy powerpoints that their cloud products are all integrated together. Nothing is further from the truth. Go take a look at the integration documentation on their SaaS products for yourself. For a start, each product could have a different way of integrating. Most of the SaaS products have very limited integration capability using modern patterns/techniques. In fact, you mostly have to batch up data in files and then run a loading job and wait for it to finish or request a file extraction to get any basic data (e..g mainly file-based integration rather than real-time web services a modern system would have). This is decades old. This has lots of impacts including not being able to do lots of things in real-time. In addition to this flaw, lots of functions are simply not available to integrate with, so there is nothing you can do even if you want to. You might need to resort to creating software to mimic a user typing stuff into a screen - I am not kidding!
- Reliability - When showing our users any of the systems in a demo/showcase type of session, it would be so nervewracking because the solutions often have bugs/ things don't work etc That's the level of confidence you have after using the software a long time. Nerves that it actually works normally.
- Pricing - Oracle have changed pricing structures over the years and it is still very difficult to figure out even if you have been working with them for a long time. It would seem a lot of users sign up to complex deals thinking they get something only to learn that their "credits" have run out and they have to pay more. The SaaS pricing is generally straight forward (by user), but try and figure out PaaS and you are in trouble. Lots of services have dependent services you need to buy and no-one at Orale can tell you how much you might need of each one or what impact buying more/less capacity might have (if it is CPU bound). Even experienced Oracle sales people find it very difficult to price a solution involving SaaS and PaaS/IaaS. The software is very expensive for what you get compared with other vendors. Prepare to burn money big time. You get locked into buying credits which you either don't use or use more and have to pay more.
8 Support - Creating a ticket with support pretty for most of the things above is like extracting blood out of a stone. The support is very slow, seem to have no clue at all about how anything works and rarely resolve anything. Every bug you find is actually a "feature". Even instances where the software on the screen says "Click here to do XYZ" and instead it does "ABC" they tell you it is working as designed. You will pull out your hair.
- Promises Promises - When Oracle try and sell the products to you, I must say the powerpoints are very flash and they really hone in on the buyer (who is generally a non techy who gets wowed by the presentations). According to the powerpoints, this software is like a Ferrari, when in reality it is like a bicycle cobbled together with bits of rusty rubbish.
10 Upgrading - HaHa! When the next version of the service (e.g. a PaaS product ) comes out after your system has been going for a year, it's often a migration exercise to the newer version as Oracle have not figured out how to upgrade an existing service. Often it will be incompatible with what you have already created. The version you are on then gets no more upgrades as they are working on the new version. So really, there is a constant upgrade battle going on. Sometimes you are forced to upgrade.
- Cornered - The only reason lots of people buy the Oracle cloud is they are legally cornered from their existing licensing conditions. They have likely have had an audit and been forced to buy cloud credits.
I could go on and on, but this is enough for now.
Even though I have so many negatives here, I do want to also mention the positives.
- In general, the Oracle pre-sales team you deal with do their best to help you out (in my experience anyway) and are fairly switched on
- Some of their SaaS software does have functionality you can't really get from other vendors
- The vision of having SaaS/PaaS/IaaS all working together is a very noble one and does resonate with enterprises (the vision is simply not being anywhere near met - 5% reached in my view)
- If you had a very Oracle DB intense workload, the Exadata in the cloud does seem a reasonable proposition
- Very occasionally I have seen some customers getting a massive discount so they can get a reference customer.
Overall however, if you had read the above you can see what a poor position Oracle is in and how much catchup they need to remain even remotely competitive. If I were a prospective customer I would be very very worried!
Rant over! ( and I feel better for it). Please ask any questions you like.