Oracle intros Arm-powered cloud, includes on-prem option for big spenders

Oracle has made good on its promise to fire up an Arm-powered cloud by revealing it will offer Ampere's 80-core Altra processors for one US cent per hour per core. Big Red will offer a single instance type – the A1 – but will offer it as virtual machines scaling up to 80 CPU cores or bare-metal instances running 160 cores. The …

[msknight]

Cloud at customer plan

Surely cheaper to have your own hardware and your own staff if it's going to be on your own site and is coming to that kind of money? What have I missed?

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Cloud at customer plan

CapEx versus OpEx: clouds tell you you can have all that scale now and you don't need to worry about all that expensive and trained IT staff.

[Pascal Monett]

Yeah, no worries.

Until The Cloud (TM) disappears for any number of reasons.

And all your work with it.

Look, I know that The Cloud (TM) can very well be a solution, but any company that uses Oracle's products has enough money to manage its own cloud.

And that still looks better to me than subscribing to a ginormous Single Point of Failure that can fall over at any time - mainly when it is least convenient - and for any amount of time, and you have no control over the recovery process.

I just can't fathom why large companies agree to take that kind of risk.

[Mike 137]

"I just can't fathom why large companies agree to take that kind of risk"

They don't see it as increased risk. The IT department is typically not hugely respected - to the extent that an IT director practically never gets a seat on the board, so replacing the IT department with a "service" provided by a "major player" makes apparent sense (particularly as you can "downsize" the staff). There's also the very common misapprehension that by outsourcing the activity you can palm off the risk on the provider. I have on numerous occasions tried to get the message across that you can't, but it's always been a hard slog with limited assurance of success.

In my experience, the real benefit of cloud (dynamic performance and capacity flexibility) is hardly ever the actual reason for adoption.