Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Guitar Center, venerable place near the mall to go buy guitars and guitar-based accessories when you’re particularly pissed at that goth kid who works at Sam Ash, shared a story of their multi-year migration to the cloud.
The story is quite standard: old custom app has run on-prem for years. It barely works and there’s far too much scrambling during times of high activity. The decision is made to move to modernize via- say it with me, kids: A Moooooooove Tooo Theeeee Clouuuuuuud. The interesting thing here is that they picked the Oracle Cloud. Not AWS, Not GCP, Not Azure. Oracle.
By all accounts (and by that I mean this press-release/puff-piece-masquarading-as-an-article that Guitar Center and Oracle clearly authorized) this was both a success, and a money-saver. By my estimation, this is probably because of their existing relationship with Oracle. Guitar Center already had a significant investment in Oracle technology, e.g. they are still using Exadata on-prem.
Which leads me to believe that the $1.5 million they’re saving comes down to the old “use Oracle databases in the Oracle Cloud and we’ll stop charging you out the wazoo for licenses. Oh, and also talk nice about us in the WSJ- crap I didn’t say that last part. Stop recording this! You’re cheating! I’m calling my mom!!”
In all seriousness, the Oracle Cloud works perfectly fine for IaaS, as this example illustrates. It just seems to work particularly finer-er, if you’re already in bed with Larry Ellison. Ew, gross. Why’d I have to word it like that??