It’s no secret that Oracle has its sights set on the cloud infrastructure market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle’s latest attempt to pry open the market is their most ambitious yet.
On September 16, Oracle announced a new, free tier of cloud services, paired with credits developers can use for additional options. Free plans come with two virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB of memory each, along with the choice of Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse. This gives developers two databases, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB of storage.
The Oracle Cloud Free Trial Credits, a $300 value, can be used on infrastructure, databases, application development, analytics, content, and experience, management and security or integration.
Until now, Oracle has had little success convincing developers to jump ship from Microsoft or Amazon. These new plans, however, could be a game-changer. The goal is to provide a way for developers to try Oracle’s services risk-free, instead of being forced to choose between committing to an untested solution or going with one of the industry leaders.
The Autonomous Database feature, in particular, is sure to drive growth. The feature has already been a solid hit with existing customers and offers companies with on-premise databases a clear path to the cloud.
Even if Oracle’s free tier of services doesn’t unseat one of the established leaders, it should help the company carve out a healthy segment of the market.