Its amazing, you have a better VPS than 15$ per month can get you on any VPS host, even if its ARM, its worth it.
As for CI/CD, I didn't know GiLlab gives you 50,000 minutes for public projects, the issue with gitlab is the recent limits make it really complex for an open source project to grow on GitLab, Yes I know there is the Gitlab Open source program, but its an unnecessary complications that doesn't exist on GitHub.
In comparison, AWS t3a.medium (2vCPU, 4GB RAM, burstable baseline 20%) will cost ~$27.45/month ($0.0376*730hr). DigitalOcean's 2vCPU 4GB Droplet will cost $24/month.
And for about the same price that AWS offers for their weak boxes ("~$27.45/mo"), Hetzner will give you 8 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM... Yes, the IPv4 cost is excluded, but it's only €0.61/month if you even want to have it.
My question is: how can you be sure you're not billed, as the post I responded to implied, if you entered payment details?
Trust me, I've worked with Oracle. They'll assign sales assistants and lawyers to you. They'll chase you down for pennies. Doesn't matter if you actually owe the money, they'll get it.
They spent fourteen months chasing up me and my project manager for $220 that we didn't owe them. They just decided that we should pay it and they'll work out if we actually owe them anything afterwards. The credit card had expired years ago and we hadn't used their products at all since 2016. Doesn't matter, they still spent a year assigning more and more of their team.
Eventually we just paid because it was cheaper than letting them take our company to court. The time taken from me, my line manager, and the project manager answering calls/emails/letters probably added up to a lot lot more than $220.
If I have a complaint, it's the really, really, really complicated management console. It's like they looked at AWS and said, "okay, like this, but somehow worse." I mean, it all makes sense, but you can smell the bad coffee and free donuts from all of the meetings with 192 separate corporate divisions on the invite list.
It took me a while to discover the free Public IP. I ran something on the free tier for most of a year, and at some point they did some kind of internal work, and my IP address changed for the first time. I didn't care before because it stayed up and unchanged for so long.
I have to say, it put Oracle on the map as a definite option for me. Even with the Bizarro World management console.
FWIW, I have a close family member who works for Oracle and they claim that they're sincerely trying to be developer/start-up friendly in hopes to gain traction in the cloud space. I get that the default is to assume there is always a hidden agenda with Oracle, but it is possible they're trying to show some good faith here.
They aren't unique among big companies to have offered utterly opaque and punitive pricing terms, but if they hope to use the free tier to attract developers into recommending Oracle to their employers, I have a hard time imagining it will be successful given what a terrible experience older folk have had with them.
Perhaps someday, people will forget the lawnmower analogy (and the reasons behind it) and they can start fresh, I guess.