Notably, though, often not by real choice. Oracle historically made it financially unpleasant to run their software on your own VMs. So you either ran on bare

Notably, though, often not by real choice. Oracle historically made it financially unpleasant to run their software on your own VMs. So you either ran on bare metal or they moved you to Oracle built hardware/software appliances, which for many use cases were VERY expensive. Which then pushed you to their cloud. Essentially, they only grant themselves a reasonable way to run Oracle software on a VM.