As far as Oracle Cloud appeal is concerned - I can totally see the big "enterprise" type IT departments using Oracle/Weblogic stack going for it at least in the "paid POC" type mode to get things rolling.

As someone who works at an "enterprise" - the default is AWS. They have the consulting network, the certifications, and the list of other big companies already using them. Their biggest challenger is Azure, because Microsoft are already in the enterprise, and have good stories to tell around helping you cloudify your Office deployment model, Exchange, etc etc etc. At that point "hosting VMs" is an easy upsell for them.

The path to HIPAA compliance in AWS is just arrange to get a business agreement with Amazon.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/

You should probably be doing a bunch of other things to be HIPAA compliant in AWS, it's not just a box you check off.

In the past you could be HIPAA compliant and use Postgresql RDS by signing a business associate agreement and doing things like using dedicated instances in their own VPC.

At a minimum, you'd still have to sign that BAA with them. I mention that not for you, but for anyone else at home thinking "oh, I can deploy RDS/PostgreSQL and be OK with HIPAA without doing anything else!" That's (still) not the case.

In logic terms, this certification is necessary but not sufficient. It's not sufficient by itself, but it is a hard requirement because RDS hasn't been covered under their BAA up until the last day or so. That is, it wasn't covered the last time I checked, maybe a week ago, but it is now today. This was confirmed by our AWS tech reps when we recently talked to them: they absolutely did not HIPAA certify PostgreSQL the last time we asked about it. And oh, how I promise you we talked about it.

In the past you could be HIPAA compliant and use Postgresql RDS by signing a business associate agreement and doing things like using dedicated instances in their own VPC.

Citation needed. We were told multiple time by our reps and solution architect that RDS+PostgreSQL was not certified in any way. The only AWS options we had for HIPAA PostgreSQL were 1) hosting our own instance (that is, not using RDS in any way, just plain old EC2) or 2) paying a third party for managed PostgreSQL hosting.