How to ensure no one ever uses your service

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Every now and then I find an online service that is so incredibly frustrating to use that I have to believe it was purposely designed to discourage use. While insurance websites come to mind, the one I'll discuss today is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry (OCIR). Like Docker Hub and GitHub Container Registry, OCIR allows you to create and share container images. However, unlike those alternatives, OCIR is painfully awful to setup. Here are the steps:

1. Sign up for an Oracle Cloud account

2. In the top-right corner of the Oracle Cloud web page, click on the avatar icon and choose "My profile"

3. Scroll down a little and in the left-hand column choose "Auth tokens"

4. Click "Generate token"

5. Provide a description (like "OCIR") and then click "Generate token"

6. Click "Show" then "Copy" and save this token password in a secure location, then click "Close"

7. In the top-right corner of the Oracle Cloud web page, click on the avatar icon and choose "Tenancy: ...."

8. Copy the value to the right of "Object storage namespace"

9. Look at the value to the right of "Home region" and then open https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Registry/Concepts/registryprerequisites.htm#regional-availability and copy the second bullet item URL

10. On your computer, run: sudo apt-get install -y podman-docker

10. Then run docker login {URL from Step 9} (e.g. "docker login iad.ocir.io")

11. For the username, use the value from Step 8 then forward-slash then your email used to login to Oracle Cloud (e.g. "axpbtayyyzzz/you@yourdomain.com")

12. For the password, use the value from Step 6

Note: if that login doesn't work, change your username to include "/oracleidentitycloudservice" in the middle (e.g. "axpbtayyyzzz/oracleidentitycloudservice/you@yourdomain.com")

Bottom line: avoid Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry and use an easier alternative.