There's absolutely no way Oracle will continue giving this away free indefinitely. With the rush they're likely to get just from this being on HN, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least temporarily disabled because of over-subscription.

As an aside, I've looked at Oracle Cloud before, and pricing definitely seems favourable compared to the big 3, and IIRC they even include a good chunk of bandwidth for free. But... I just don't trust Oracle. Now, it might well be that Oracle Cloud is completely separate from the rest of Oracle, in which case I might be more tempted - anyone here work at Oracle Cloud and can share, even with a throwaway if you're too embarrassed to admit to it? :P

I worked for an adtech business unit at Oracle until recently (my choice to leave). It's a massive organization of over 100,000 employees (not to mention contractors AFAIK). Every business unit is run kinda like separate companies with their own cultures and practices and whatnot.

There are better and worse orgs and managers as you would expect of a company of that size.

As far as I can tell there was literally no specific "Oracle" culture. Some of the well-known cultures attributed to "Oracle" may be true of specific business units like Oracle database or ERP but it's hard to say without having been in every one of those business units. But my adtech business unit was nothing like the nightmare/FUD stories you hear online.

Yeah it's ten terabytes of data transfer out per month for free. That would cost like $900 on AWS

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. Think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawn mower"

That's not a great comparison. Lawnmower salesmen don't actively try to persuade you to stick your hand into the moving blades.

Ellison isn't the salesman, he's the lawnmower.

And don't assume you're the operator of said lawnmower. You are, in fact, the grass.

For those unfamiliar with this quote, this is the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

Indefinitely? Mmmmmmm probably not. This is clearly a loss-leader for them to draw in more customers, so you can’t guarantee it won’t change

This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down the line I might have an informed opinion to share in business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty smart.

Or they are just totally failing in the cloud and this is an indication of that.

Also not hard to imagine the whole cloud getting shut down and/or sold to Salesforce (and shut down)

They’re definitely not doing well in the “casual cloud user” space, which hurts them because nobody is familiar with their console and APIs. Everyone knows how to do stuff on AWS because we’ve all done personal throwaway projects there. Somewhere else in this thread someone posted their notes on the confusing console, and reading through it, it doesn’t look any more complicated than AWS to me, but familiarity is valuable. Maybe this is a play for that type of usage.

It's free because no one would choose them over AWS, GCP, etc if it cost anything. The second they think they no longer have to dangle free things in front of developers in order to get their business, it will no longer be free.