12 Comments
Mar 7, 2023Liked by Gergely Orosz

"carries the risk of outrages being catastrophic" -> s/outrages/outages/

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Haha, yes! I mean, technically 'outrages' could be correct, but it was a typo :) Fixed!

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I’d be curious to know why GCP and Oracle are selected as the cloud vendors for Uber

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Igor: covering it in the next part!

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I would think that if you buy a lot of hardware with OEM, you would get discounts from manufacturers since you are buying very large volumes from them. How come it doesn't work that way?

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The capex vs. opex discussion feels a little one-sided; in my experience finance prefers capex since depreciation is below the line for EBITDA calculations. Also for the example, leases can still be capitalized as long as they cover 75% of the useful life of the thing being leased. (This also undercuts the concern about cash flow impact.)

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Oracle will turn out to be a bad choice, I don't think they're mature enough for this. crazy decision

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@BowTiedCelt: do you have anything to back this up with? Oracle Cloud was late to the market and is making up with very good offerings. Uber evaluated providers strictly - having talked with people - and there’s a reason they chose Oracle.

Zoom also went with Oracle: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle-cloud-over-aws-and-maybe-you-should-too/

From the article:

“ look at the difference in pricing with Oracle. You’re *starting negotiations* at an order of magnitude lower than any of your competitors. Plus, Oracle helpfully tells me that if I sign on to a 1-year flex commitment, they’ll throw in a 30% discount unprompted on their website.

There’s just no contest. AWS’s data transfer pricing is a sad joke that should give folks serious pause when evaluating a cloud provider.”

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I don't think their service offerings are mature enough to support a Uber. Would need to know the scope of what's migrating.

Also Dara's face is already on oracle clouds landing page, being the most complex customer is usually not a good sign

Discounts are great too but does anyone actually know how to use oracle cloud?

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Mar 9, 2023·edited Mar 9, 2023Author

@BowTiedCelt I wrote more details on Part 2. Uber ran their own data centers for ~10 years. Oracle has probably the most flexible bare metal offering on the market, even more so than AWS Nitro. Uber never signs such contracts without extensive evaluation, and this was the case here as well.

Your company does what they see as best: Uber decided after their Uber Metal team (the team building Uber's data centers) did their thorough evaluation. Let's just say they know what they are looking for in a vendor offering.

And, again, we don't know exactly what Uber is getting from Oracle, and what from Google Cloud. In Part 2 I write how it's more likely that Oracle will be more useful for IaaS services. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/inside-ubers-move-to-the-cloud-part

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Will give it a read thanks.

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My firm doesn't use OCI for any business apps because the offerings just arnt mature enough for our workloads. So I am biased.

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