Off-topic, but is there a reason for small companies/projects to use Oracle Cloud? Are their prices and feature set competitive against AWS, Azure and GCP for this audience?
My understanding is that the three reasons people use Oracle Cloud are:
1. You're valuable enough of a marketing point that they're willing to give you insane discounts to reel you in (see Zoom)
2. You're locked in enough on other Oracle technologies and they've raised your license fees but coincidentally it comes with a big bundle discount if you also use Oracle cloud, or maybe you just failed an audit and Oracle said the problem will go away if you buy some cloud services.
3. For really small scale (like some dude on r/selfhosted scale, not even startup scale), they offer a free tier that doesn't have a time limit
I forget the exact specs but it had close to 200 cores and a team of highly paid dbas that had optimized every aspect. Even the worst of queries would come back instantly.
We had a database growing by around 200GB of relevant data per month. While I'm not a fan of Oracle having worked there long ago, that database was unbelievably fast. They moved to MySQL years later and it required a much much bigger tin after being heavily optimized.
It was for an enterprise web app (.net) that was used to process seemingly millions of applications per month which would then pull in a whole ton of external data.
I looked at traffic pricing (the most outrageous item among the big three cloud providers).
Outbound traffic from US/Europe is $0.0085 USD per GB. That's roughly an order of magnitude cheaper. Also, 10 TB free will be enough for many small use cases. The billing based on source instead of destination also makes the cost a bit more predictable.
That's just list price, of course, and it's still well above e.g. Hetzner, but it's a reasonable price.
Does anyone pay list price for AWS? Either you're small enough to avail of startup credits etc. or you're big enough to negotiate a personalised discount
If you know what you're doing, and knows a better part of the AWS services, the discount you'll get just by knowing what you're doing is probably bigger at that point.
Cloud native can go to either extreme cost wise, and it's very dependent on good engineering (which, unfortunately, is the exception not the norm).
