I primarily tested on the cloud but I tried the on-premises version once.
It's about consolidation. They are trying to solve all the issues. Oracle has many solutions for managing resources. For example, if you have many applications to maintain, some applications share the same database. They need to restart, which will impact the other applications. You will have to stop all the services and that adds to downtime.
To solve this issue, Oracle Multitenant provides one container database. It is set up with many databases within each other as in a schema database. You will make each application connected to the pluggable database.
The database becomes pluggable. Inside this container is called a pluggable database and each application contains this pluggable database inside multitenant. We can then share resources like control files, memory, etc. This lets you stop and start each application without impacting the others. This resource sharing is the most valuable feature
If you would like to do this with the older version or another system, you would have to install many databases and each database will get a resource. Then you have to buy resources for the license, CPU, server, etc.
This is the main feature they use this solution for. Of course, if you get a cloud database service, they may not give you a dedicated database. If so, they will provide a pluggable one for part of the container like virtualization or clone. You can use this solution in that way also.
According to my point of view, this is the main feature with 12c compared to 11. It is called 12c for the cloud since they are preparing to move more to the cloud.
In the cloud, you're sharing resources. Not every database has a high load, so they distribute resources from one controller to this pluggable database.
They are sharing resources because there are usually wasted resources otherwise. There are companies that check the vitalization of your server, memory, hardware, and infrastructure. You will find that 70% or 80% of your resources are wasted.