Exploring Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Oracle Cloud is trying to break into the cloud infrastructure market. One such way is by betting developers familiar with the products through free tier offerings.

Want to follow along? Start by setting up a free Oracle Cloud account at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

NOTE: The Oracle Cloud setup process has quite a few steps and requires a valid CC (Discover did not work in my case, but my Visa was accepted).

For this example, I am creating a free tier ARM 4 core, 24GB ram, 100GB boot VM (the free tier limit on compute and half the free tier limit on storage).

Step by step:

1. On the Get Started homepage, in the Launch Resources section, select the Create a VM instance box.
2. Input a custom, memorable name for your VM.
3. In the Image and Shape box click the Edit hyperlink.
4. In the expanded image and shape options box, click Change image.
5. Recommend selecting the latest Canonical Ubuntu image or at least updating the Oracle Linux image to the latest version. Then click select image to save the changes.
6. Back in the expanded image and shape options box, click Change shape.
7. For this example, select the Ampere box, and check the VM.Standard.A1.Flex option. Then in the expanded shape options drag the Number of OCPUs slider to 4 and the memory should also slide in kind to 24 on the Amount of memory (GB) slider. Remember to click Select shape to save the changes.
8. Optional: In the expanded section after clicking Show advanced options in the Networking box, you may want to enter a hostname for easier domain name connectivity.
9. The rest of the Networking options are left as is to create a Publicly accessible VM in a new VCN and subnet.
10. Important: Save the Private and Public SSH keys now from the Add SSH Keys section.
11. Optional: In the Boot Volume section, you may want to disable the Use in-transit encryption option to improve performance if your use case does not involve sensitive data.
12. Recommend: Leave the rest of the options at default values for now. NOTE: The boot size can be expanded later if needed, but not shrunk.
13. Finally, click the Create button at the bottom and wait a couple minutes for your VM to be ready.

Once ready, we can perform our first SSH connection.

chmod 600 my-secret-key.key
ssh -i my-secret-key.key ubuntu@10.0.0.0

Remember to updated your iptables for your services and open the ports needed in the subnet's security list!

Check out many guides for setting up services on Oracle Cloud at https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/developer-tutorials/tutorials/apache-on-ubuntu/01oci-ubuntu-apache-summary.htm