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"I didn't know Oracle cloud offered a decent free tier"

It's more than their free tier[1]. There are a number of nice things in OCI. For example: Redundant control plane hosts for their non-"free tier" k8s clusters are free. The equivalent of AWS's cross-AZ traffic is free (as opposed to $0.02/GB at AWS); a huge win for certain use cases. They're using a open, platform agnostic "specification" (the Fn Project[2]) for serverless cloud functions, which is wonderful for local dev and test. Terraform is tier 1 with OCI; from documentation through support Terraform is the reference "infrastructure as code" solution on OCI, always comprehensive and robust. Oracle Linux is pretty good; better than Amazon Linux has been, although with AL2023 Amazon is starting to close the gap. OCI instance shapes are very flexible. Overall costs are lower; Oracle is aggressively competing on price. Instance live migration (à la KVM live migrate) is a thing at OCI, so Oracle can live migrate running instances to isolate failing hardware.

I could go on.

Yes, I'd say OCI isn't as stable as AWS. Anecdotally: I get occasional "event notification" in my inbox; perhaps 4 in roughly 2 years, which is fewer (1) than I've seen from AWS in the same time. All but 1 was tangential, didn't actually impact anything that matters, and were quickly resolved. I actually received the OCI notice in my email today before it popped up on HN, which is "different" than how it usually goes with AWS.

[1] My experience is limited to AWS and OCI. [2] https://fnproject.io/

p.s. I appreciate that Oracle has earned the hate it receives from most, and I too have been a victim in my prehistoric past. OCI is, however, different; it's a pay-as-you-go platform that provides Oracle with no customer-abuse opportunities given the strength of the competitors, and my experience with it has been entirely cromulent.