Azure and Oracle Cloud – My First Time

Below talks about my experience trying out Azure and Oracle cloud for the very first time (and at the same time).

So last night I tried for the very 1st time the Azure and Oracle Cloud. Here, I just like to share my experience. BTW I am a big fan of DigitalOcean because of its user friendly interface, very fast to setup (end to end 2 minutes w/ few button clicks), and fantastic community and HOWTOs (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/). If I have to choose a cloud dev environment provider I would still use DigitalOcean.

Now, being a newbie on both these platforms. I’m looking for a similar experience as DigitalOcean.

The cloud experience comparison is broken down to 3 categories:

• Signup from scratch
• Creating a database and connecting to that database
• Overall UI

Signup from scratch

• azure
  • It just ask for my microsoft account then keyed in my credit card info then it gave me $200 credits. It’s not 30 day trial but a consumable amount without any time limit. (please correct me if I’m wrong)
  • Then you will be redirected to your dashboard

  http://i.imgur.com/PvGwCj7.png
  

• oracle cloud

  • It just ask for my otn account, no credit card required. After that you have 30 days to play.
  • Before you can get to you dashboard. You will first need to select your data center. This is not intuitive and I have to guess my data center, and then finally I figured “Public Cloud Services – US” is the one.

  http://i.imgur.com/QJ6yoZo.png
  

  • Then you will be redirected to this page. Where you have to input the “Identity Domain”. I took me a couple of minutes of google’ing and watching two youtube videos to figure out how to login to my dashboard. And then finally a “Welcome to Oracle Cloud” email was sent w/ my temporary password and identity domain. I think I reset my password the reason I got that email.

  http://i.imgur.com/m9SnrTM.png
  

  • Then you’ll be redirected to your dashboard

  http://i.imgur.com/a1ZfrMi.png
  

Creating a database and connecting to that database

• azure

  • I just clicked on the VM template https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/microsoft/sqlservervnextonredhatenterpriselinux72/
  • And then redirected me to my dashboard, and chose the smallest VM config. Entered database name, password and resource name. And that’s it!
  • Then I logged in through SSH, executed “sudo /opt/mssql/bin/sqlservr-setup” (as stated on the VM template documentation)
  • And installed the sql-cli https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/developer-get-started/node-rhel (as stated on the doc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-setup)
  • Overall time is 10 mins (5 mins provision, 5 mins DB create/config)
  • Check out my tweet here – It shows SQL Server vNext (CTP1) on RHEL https://twitter.com/karlarao/status/799087650221211648
• oracle cloud
  • On the dashboard -> Click
    • “Create Instance” ->
    • “Oracle Database Cloud Service” ->
    • Database ->
    • “Create Service” ->
    • Subscription ->
    • DB Version ->
    • Edition ->
    • Details (forms to fillout – username/password/service name/You have to download the SSHkey) ->
    • Confirmation ->
    • Create
  • The “Oracle Database Cloud Service” took about 36 mins to finish. I’ve already watched 2 quarters of basketball – GSW vs Raptors. And on my laptop screen I’m just waiting for this text to finish.

    > SSH access to VM [DB_1/vm-1] succeeded…
    > Oracle Database Server Configuration completed…
    > Successfully provisioned Oracle Database Server…
    > Service Reachabilty Check (SRC) of Oracle Database Server [karlaraodev] completed…

  • I tried the “Oracle Database Cloud Service – Virtual Image” and you have to go through the similar steps. It’s much faster to provision and takes about 8 mins.

  http://i.imgur.com/Y36m8YU.png
  

  • At this point I’m already tired and to figure out how to connect and do a simple SELECT can wait for another day. (I’ve got too many tabs open from researching)

Overall UI

The overall UI of Azure is much better. It’s intuitive and integrated. When you click on the “+” button all products are nicely categorized and you can search on the Marketplace as well (plugins like New Relic monitoring).

http://i.imgur.com/BugxBuM.png

Also the Azure site is built on ASP.NET MVC, I don’t know what client frontend framework they used but it’s pretty sleek. Then Oracle is based J2EE and Foundation (more like Bootstrap). And DigitalOcean uses rails + emberjs. See more details below:

• https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fportal.azure.com <- built w/ ASP.NET MVC
• https://builtwith.com/cloud.oracle.com <- built w/ J2EE and Foundation
• https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fcloud.digitalocean.com <- built w/ rails + ember.js (got this info from ember inspector, and BTW I love ember.js)

All in all Azure is very easy to use compared to Oracle Cloud and I can see Microsoft gearing towards developer productivity/happiness w/ this site https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/developer-get-started/node-rhel and the vscode https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/introvideos/overview and this https://gitter.im/mssqldev/Lobby and this channel9 https://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/sql+server?sort=viewed, I hope they do more tutorials https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-video-demo-tutorial-list like what DigitalOcean have.

-Karl