Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a really great platform to run many types of operating systems on many compute instance shapes available with larger amounts of NVMe storage, lots of threads or cores and super fast networking. OCI lets you run pretty much any operating system (Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, any Linux pretty much runs..and of course Oracle Linux). With the Emulation Mode VMs, you can go way back with old version and someone even showed OS2 running!
One really nice thing about OCI is the fact that Oracle Linux support is included at no additional cost. I wrote about this before. You can file SRs, you get support for OL5 extended support, you can use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control instances to manage the OS, you can use spacewalk, you can use kubernetes, docker, it's all included. We have local yum repository mirrors inside OCI regions for fast downloads of packages and also making sure you get these without incurring external network traffic. And of course, we do very frequent updates of the Oracle Linux images so that you can always start instance create with the latest and greatest updates. We have scripts to make life easier (such as oci-utils), we create RPMs for the OCI CLI, python SDK, terraform provider etc.. so you don't have to manually download scripts or tools and compile or install them, it's all there.
Another reason is that we all work very closely together to support you. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure development team and the Oracle Linux development team work hand in hand to figure out what went wrong, in the rare case something happens. We're one team towards our customers and partners.
Another nice thing with Oracle Linux in OCI is the on-premises angle. When you run Oracle Linux on your serves on-prem, you have access to the exact same code, packages, with a support subscription you have full Oracle support, and even without a support subscription you have access to the errata updates, and all the packages I mentioned here without a need for authorization keys or access codes. It's all right there. If you are an ISV that wants to package an application and embed an OS, OL is perfect (you can distribute it for free, you can decide to get support subscriptions when you need it without being forced to change OSs underneath) you can then take that exact same code and run it in a cloud environment, and in OCI in particular at no additional cost including full support. Create a VM image and distribute the entire image, no contract needed. You can provide that VM image on-premises or in the cloud. You can install it on bare-metal servers, it's not limited to VMs. And of course customers have the flexibility of moving between on-premises and Oracle Cloud without having to worry. Same code, predictable cost. Full support in both places.
Whether you are a developer, a customer with test and development systems, production systems, an ISV that creates solution bundles with an embedded OS... no difference. You don't have to worry about taking an RPM from your developer platform and install it on your production system.
Want to play with docker images? They're on docker hub, they're on Oracle Container registry, free to use by anyone and everyone. Both in our cloud (and any cloud) and on-premises. Regularly updated images. For the exact some OS you can run in production, in test/dev, for developers, ISVs, anywhere. No distinction. And we have an OCI mirror of our Container registry, again, for fast access and to ensure you don't create external network usage.
Sure there are other Linux distributions out there. Free ones, great, but if you need help, support, service levels for production, it's not offered. Commercial ones, well, no such flexibility, not even close. And if something goes wrong, you deal with at least 2 companies to figure out what happened. 1 call, 1 SR, on-prem, in cloud. Same code everywhere.
Public Oracle Linux yum server
Source code https://oss.oracle.com/sources/
full public git repo with mainline and our commits, transparent. (not tar balls to actually try and obfuscate)