Today was the first day of Oracle Open World and during Larry Ellison’s afternoon keynote he made a number of extremely exciting announcements around Oracle Autonomous Database including the launch of an Always Free Tier for Developers and students in the Oracle Cloud. Larry said, “as long as you use the service, it will be there, free forever.”
So what’s included in Oracle’s Always Free Tier?
Along with compute and storage services, you also get access to 2 Autonomous Database with 20GB of storage each absolutely free. So you can try out both an Autonomous Data Warehouse and an Autonomous Transaction Processing system.
Larry also announced Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated Infrastructure, which is aimed at folks who are looking to rethinking Database I.T. by providing them with a private Database cloud on the Oracle Public Cloud.
Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure
Juan Loaiza also gave a great detailed session on Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicated where he explained that just like Autonomous Database Serverless, 
you can run both transaction processing and data warehousing workloads. Where this new offering differs is in the deployment.
With dedicated, you get your own isolated Exadata Infrastructure, within a hardware enforced Virtual Cloud Network. Making it fully isolated from all other cloud tenants.
On that dedicated Exadata rack you can create multiple container databases, with one or more pluggable databases. With each pluggable database being an Autonomous Database, just as you would expect from the original serverless deployment.
Given you are the only customer on this dedicated Exadata infrastructure, you can customizable the policies used to manage the Autonomous Database Dedicated, if you wish.
You can customize the patching policy, selecting when the system is updated. This allows you to avoid updates during peak periods and gives you the opportunity to deploy new versions on test/dev database before production.
You can also separate databases by organization (sales, HR, marketing)
criticality or purpose (dev, test or production) by creating multiple container databases, which can have different levels of HA and or DR.
One of the key advantages you get by using Oracle Autonomous Database Dedicate is the automatic workload optimization, including Automatic Indexing. Juan mentioned that SAP recently tested it and automatic indexing added a handful of additional indexes to those defined by SAP out of the box and they saw a 10% improvements in performance. So it can help you define the right indexes for new applications or help keep your existing application performant.
Hopefully now with the free tier, even more people can experience how easy, fast, and elastic the Oracle Autonomous Database really is!