15 ms·

Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

162 points by Naac 5y ago

ccpcx 5y ago
They're also giving free e-training and certs until the end of the year. If you don't already know Oracle there's not much time to study, but if you do you can sit some remote exams for free
zxspectrum1982 5y ago
I've run CoreMark PRO on one of those free Ampere 4-core + 24 GB RAM instances, running Oracle Linux 8.4. TL;DR: that free instance performs very very well. WORKLOAD RESULTS TABLE MultiCore SingleCore Workload Name (iter/s) (iter/s) Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- cjpeg-rose7-preset 625.00 172.41 3.63 core 6.86 1.72 3.99 linear_alg-mid-100x100-sp 595.24 154.80 3.85 loops-all-mid-10k-sp 29.96 7.80 3.84 nnet_test 28.09 8.45 3.32 parser-125k 190.48 50.00 3.81 radix2-big-64k 3289.47 848.90 3.87 sha-test 1000.00 277.78 3.60 zip-test 500.00 125.00 4.00 MARK RESULTS TABLE Mark Name MultiCore SingleCore Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- CoreMark-PRO 23719.00 6305.03 3.76 For comparison, this is the result on my laptop: Intel Core i7-10850H @ 2.70 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and RHEL 8.4 x86_64: WORKLOAD RESULTS TABLE MultiCore SingleCore Workload Name (iter/s) (iter/s) Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- cjpeg-rose7-preset 833.33 166.67 5.00 core 10.31 1.99 5.18 linear_alg-mid-100x100-sp 1063.83 236.97 4.49 loops-all-mid-10k-sp 34.29 8.55 4.01 nnet_test 36.10 8.64 4.18 parser-125k 111.11 23.81 4.67 radix2-big-64k 2890.17 716.85 4.03 sha-test 909.09 208.33 4.36 zip-test 666.67 200.00 3.33 MARK RESULTS TABLE Mark Name MultiCore SingleCore Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- CoreMark-PRO 27058.61 6251.38 4.33 So that free Ampere instance performs slightly better than my i7-10850H on single-core, and just 10% slower on multi-core (and that's considering my i7-10850H has 6 cores, while the Ampere has only 4 cores!!!).
discardedrefuse 5y ago
Necro-ing this post because I, too, was tempted to check this out. So I opened an Oracle Cloud account on the 10th, though I never created any instances. All I did was setup MFA on the account (which, BTW, was obscenely difficult to enable) and look around a bit. Oracle makes you add a credit card during account creation and they do a $1.00 temporary charge to make sure the card is valid. Well, here we are 3 days later and I have 3 x $1.00 charges pending on my credit card from Oracle (2 on the 10th and 1 today). I don't know if these charges will actually post to my card or disappear like they're supposed to; but this doesn't look good.
sgt 5y ago
Can you run a small business on this, indefinitey, for free?
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  It's free because no one would choose them over AWS, GCP, etc if it cost anything. The second they think they no longer have to dangle free things in front of developers in order to get their business, it will no longer be free.
- andrewxdiamond 5y ago
  Indefinitely? Mmmmmmm probably not. This is clearly a loss-leader for them to draw in more customers, so you can’t guarantee it won’t change
  - nefitty 5y ago
    This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down the line I might have an informed opinion to share in business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty smart.
    - outside1234 5y ago
      Or they are just totally failing in the cloud and this is an indication of that. Also not hard to imagine the whole cloud getting shut down and/or sold to Salesforce (and shut down)
      - hamburglar 5y ago
        They’re definitely not doing well in the “casual cloud user” space, which hurts them because nobody is familiar with their console and APIs. Everyone knows how to do stuff on AWS because we’ve all done personal throwaway projects there. Somewhere else in this thread someone posted their notes on the confusing console, and reading through it, it doesn’t look any more complicated than AWS to me, but familiarity is valuable. Maybe this is a play for that type of usage.
bborud 5y ago
With Oracle you always read the fine print. I wouldn't risk touching this with your ten foot pole.
- ransom1538 5y ago
  It's hard to build yachts by giving away free machines.
  - bborud 5y ago
    There is more money in treating customers even just slightly better.
  - worik 5y ago
    "He gives the kids free samples because he knows full well that today's young, innocent faces will be tomorrow's clientele"
- gajus 5y ago
  If you are a startup and using Oracle, then your are NGMI Use common sense
  - 1_player 5y ago
    "Not Going To Make It", for people who are not into the latest trendy acronyms.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Thanks. I'd expanded it to "Not Getting My Investment", which might also be fitting.
- hermitdev 5y ago
  Free, you say? Oracle, you say? No, no, the price is too high.
quiffledwerg 5y ago
The large print giveth. The small print taketh away.
- hi_hello 5y ago
  Thus is the way of the Oracle
  - sgt 5y ago
    I love how HN is extremely skeptical towards Oracle.
eatonphil 5y ago
Lest folks not read the actual article, STH is pretty happy about this offering: > To us, this is a big deal. This is perhaps one of the best “free” instances that one can get. Something that we really like about Oracle’s Always Free tier is that one can use it without being as worried about overages as with Amazon’s offering. AWS has a size advantage, but Oracle has a great Always Free Tier offering.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I don't notice anything in the STH article about the license terms. (Sorry if I'm just missing it.) Given Oracle's reputation, no evaluation is complete without a thorough examination of those terms, ideally by a competent lawyer.
  - mihcsab 5y ago
    You have to manually upgrade your account to get charged.
    - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
      I bet you don't need to upgrade your account to receive nastygrams from Oracle legal, though.
      - amock 5y ago
        I've had an account for a couple of years and I might have received a survey email once, but otherwise I have received only things like notifications about infrastructure changes and there haven't been many of those.
  - westpfelia 5y ago
    If you are running a business sure. But personally I just would like a beefy cloud instance to run some things off of for personal use. Kinda perfect for that.
svdr 5y ago
The offer is here: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
Hjfrf 5y ago
Nice. I assumed cryptocurrency fraudsters would stop these kinds of offerings for the near future.
- chc4 5y ago
  You have to provide a valid credit card in order to sign up for the free account, which probably helps stymie abuse.
SimianSci 5y ago
Enticing, but a part of me is still very hesitant to get in bed with Oracle. They've gained a reputation of trying to lock customers in so that their legal department can "innovate" more ways of squeezing money out of them. The common joke remains that Oracle is actually just two law-firms in a software-company trenchcoat. Until this reputation changes, any offer they present smells suspiciously like a baited hook.
- _jal 5y ago
  Never invite a vampire into your home is timeless advice.
- smarx007 5y ago
  Had IBM Cloud account for a while. At some point, they started to attach a notice to a monthly $0 bill along the lines: if you card gets declined, we will fine you $25 and if you don't pay in 7 days, we will fine you further $50. Easiest account termination decision I have ever had. I guess the first email from Oracle "we are making routine changes to the T&Cs and our privacy policy" will be the end of my account.
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    Is this even legal? In most jurisdictions, you have to be a government to fine anybody. Sending frivolous charges may be considered fraud and also lead to chargebacks.
    - evandwight 5y ago
      It's not a government fine. It's just an agreement in the contract specifying a payment is due if your card declines.
      - thriftwy 5y ago
        I'm not sure that is legal either. You can charge for some product or service but, unless you are a licensed bank, you can't lend out money and charge for overdraft, which is basically something they're doing here. And even a bank can only do it against accounts open in that bank.
m4xm4n 5y ago
nice try Oracle!
Tepix 5y ago
That's a sweet deal. How much is 100GB extra disk space per month?
- matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  2.55 dollars/month for an extra 100GB -- you get 200GB free but they are hard to come buy because of where they are located. I ended up getting the entire free tier as expected, except for the storage which wasn't available in the region I selected. I'm _very_ happy with the setup, and here's a silly github workflow to deploy to oracle cloud: https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/oracle_actions https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/oracle_actions
- Const-me 5y ago
  Block storage is $0.0425 / GB / month with ”balanced” I/O performance level whatever that means, file storage is $0.30 / GB / month. Block volumes are attached to a specific virtual machine which views that thing as a local disk. File storage is deployed on the virtual network, that thing is visible to all VMs in the network as an NFS server.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chomp 5y ago
I played around with Oracles free tier. When you first sign up, you must choose a “home” region. You cannot add another region on the free plan. These awesome free instances are very limited stock. You have no way of knowing if the region you choose has stock of the desired instances before you select the region. You may not change your “home” region. You will get sales phone calls. Caveat emptor.
- mihcsab 5y ago
  If you wait a bit, you can get what you want to try.
- smarx007 5y ago
  You can change the zone within the region. There were no free Ampere instances in the Frankfurt AZ1, I found them in AZ2. Though it only works for the Ampere. 1vCPU x86 VM can only be spun up in AZ1.
  - chomp 5y ago
    Gotcha. I had signed up in a US region and there was nary an ARM server to be found. I was quite disappointed. Then sales people reminded me of my disappointment weeks after.
    - raffraffraff 5y ago
      I signed up months ago so I could get enough virtual crap to start a "working" k8s cluster for messing around with, doing CV KA etc. Haven't used it yet (doing other stuff) but am planning on kicking off next month. I got a single salesy email, and I replied that the account is for personal use, I have no money and no intention of monetising my tire-kicking, so it's forever free-tier. That was the end of it. You also have to explicitly flip a switch so they are allowed to charge you. If you don't, you simply can't deploy anything beyond the free tier. That's my understanding of their documentation of the free tier, but that was made clear enough.
- alx__ 5y ago
  So when i sign up I should the phone number of my nemesis? Noted.
voz_ 5y ago
I'd rather pay more at every possible instance than interact with Oracle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
graton 5y ago
1) The article is from May 2021 2) When I checked today the free Ampere instance was a 1 core, 6GB of memory, 1 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 2 virtual NICs. Edit: I spoke too soon. After selecting it I was able to increase the CPU count to 4 and 24GB of memory. I provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04, logged in and I see 4 CPUs and 24GB of memory. Cool. The free x86 instance is 1 core, 1GB of memory, 0.48 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 1 virtual NIC.
PaulHoule 5y ago
https://www.shortform.com/blog/48-laws-of-power-law-40-despise-the-free-lunch/ https://www.shortform.com/blog/48-laws-of-power-law-40-despi...
dijit 5y ago
Be extremely wary of Oracle free tiers. They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance. This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency). I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice. I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system. Caveat Emptor. EDIT: in case someone thinks I am joking. This was one of the packs: https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E
- rozap 5y ago
  Oh my god. Oracle having my address and credit card number is a nightmare scenario.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I wonder what happens if you sign up with a fake name, semi-disposable email address and a prepaid visa gift card that has $3.50 remaining balance on it.
    - john2010 5y ago
      accounts get cancelled after a few weeks!
    - phonebanshee 5y ago
      Afaik AWS and GCP refuse visa gift cards, although it's been a while since I tried. Wouldn't surprise me to hear Oracle is the same.
    - imalerba 5y ago
      Signed up with Revolut disposable cards, will see
nvaoz 5y ago
If you want desperate salesmen calling and emailing you every day for months, this is your best option!
gjsman-1000 5y ago
Been using it for months for a Minecraft server. Runs 10+ players with mods without much difficulty. I limited the RAM usage to 6GB though so that the Garbage Collector doesn't go nuts.
- andai 5y ago
  Wait, are you saying Java performs worse if you give it more memory to work with?
  - dijit 5y ago
    It can. GC pauses cause stuttering. More memory is a longer GC pause. This is only the case if you allocate and deallocate a lot. Also: never go larger than 32GiB on heap else you’ll end up with 64bit inter pointers: that will seriously degrade performance.
  - sulam 5y ago
    This very much depends on the GC you're using. But yes, a full GC will take longer the more memory you have. Therefore you want to avoid full GCs like the plague.
  - sz4kerto 5y ago
    No. More accurately: with very large heaps the default performance characteristics of the GC might be different than what you’d like it to be. For example you might get huge throughput but occasional long GC pauses. But it’s all tunable.
  - winrid 5y ago
    No. A bigger heap means more work for a memory manager. If you just give it more memory, but your app doesn't use it, no harm done. Honestly Java in 2021 can handle huge heaps pretty well. Not sure which GC they are running.
- schmorptron 5y ago
  Uuuh, good idea!
bee_rider 5y ago
Of course, nobody really likes Oracle. But it is pretty cool and impressive that Ampere is able to trade blows favorably with something the size of Amazon.
Taywee 5y ago
"Oracle" and "free" in the same sentence raises alarms. I've seen many years of Oracle filling their "free" offerings with horrible trap doors into massive amounts of financial obligation that are way too easy to accidentally fall through.
rowanG077 5y ago
It's a trap send no reply.
renewiltord 5y ago
How will any of these be available? If they're free and unrestricted, people will squat them and never give them up. Why would you ever give up any of these? And if you don't need payment details, you can just make multiple accounts to squat them.
- Jansen312 5y ago
  If AWS can pull the plugs on paying customer earlier this year due to political reasons, why wouldn't Larry do so to free tiers for business reasons. Those squatters will get evicted easily just like any squatters in America. Since they have very limited means to engage lawyers, every courts in America will hand Larry a hall pass easily. As many have said, you just simply don't invite vampires in no matter how voluptuous and scantily-dressed or muscular Tom-Cruise-handsome.
marcodiego 5y ago
"Instances". I thought they're getting rid of surplus.
Tomte 5y ago
I find the Oracle dashboard very confusing. My notes: https://www.2uo.de/Computing/setting-up-a-free-server-in-oracle-cloud/ https://www.2uo.de/Computing/setting-up-a-free-server-in-ora... Also this: https://www.2uo.de/Computing/firewall-in-oracle-cloud/ https://www.2uo.de/Computing/firewall-in-oracle-cloud/
_red 5y ago
Can't even sign up. Gives generic error about "payment / registration failed" - its a regular credit card that I use everywhere. Oh well...kinda glad to be honest. Knowing Oracle it will eventually become a nightmare anyway (whoops, we accidentally billed you $70 for the free-tier, but you need to manually call this long-distance number between the hours of 9am-4pm to reverse the charge and this also happens to be our sales dept)
- slig 5y ago
  Had this exactly error couple of weeks ago. Tried multiple good CC and it never worked. Blessing in disguise.
artembugara 5y ago
Oracle for Startups gives 70% off for 2 years: https://www.oracle.com/startup/explore-the-program/ https://www.oracle.com/startup/explore-the-program/
- nieve 5y ago
  I wonder how many startups hit that 3.3x price increase at 25 months and scramble to move elsewhere because the costs were still higher than they should have been at 70% off?
  - artembugara 5y ago
    It cost a lot to move elsewhere. Usually.
Tomte 5y ago
You can install Debian (and other distributions) by downloading the netboot.xyz EFI boot image, then open a "cloud connection", reboot the instance, press ESC, and then boot from file.
freemint 5y ago
During the last ARM HPC User Group conf i was able to get my hands a 160 core instance, i was shocked, holy moly do they beat Xeon when it comes to SAT solving in my test with HordeSAT.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
frankjr 5y ago
I signed a few months ago and overall the experience have been positive. Initially there was an issue with the availability of the A1 instances (Switzerland North) but after a few trials I managed to grab one. You also get some free credit to spend during the first month ($300 I believe) so I was running with 32 vCPUs, 128GB ram, and 32Gbps network. I have now downscaled to the free tier. I was a bit disappointed with the selection of operating systems but fortunately you can upload your own image (QCOW2) and create an instance from it (I'm running Alpine now). You can even upload your VMs directly from VirtualBox but I haven't tried that (right click -> Export to OCI). Getting IPv6 working was a bit of a hassle because it's not enabled by default and you need to make changes in multiple places [0] but it works fine now. There's a good enough Cost Analysis section where you can see your current usage broken down to days and you can create alerts based on that. Overall I find the Administration Console to be more pleasant than Amazon's but still miles behind Scaleway's. [0] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/ipv6-on-oracle-cloud-infrastructure https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/ipv6-on-o...
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
at the end of the day its Oracle... Bite me once, shame on you; bite me twice.. shame on me. I dont know one person who has not got an oracle hate story. As long as Larry has his billion $ yacht, the clientelle cant go to hell!
hvgk 5y ago
Your kidneys are probably mentioned in the small print.
notreallyserio 5y ago
All, How does the performance on these compare to similar VMs at other clouds? Anyone here on HN published benchmarks? Thanks in advance, Barry Elisson
pt_PT_guy 5y ago
even in US I only see 1vcore, 6gb ram option.
NmAmDa 5y ago
After the trial ends, your ARM instance will get deleted and you will be back to free tier offer. You can use 300$ to try with. You have to upgrade to paying accounr manually so you are not going to have surprise bill if you stick to free tier always and never upgrades. But good luck finding arm instance in your home zone because the demand is very high so you have to keep trying from time to time. There are some people using scripts to automate the instance availability and registration so they can catch the opportunity.
- pikdum 5y ago
  After it's deleted, you can spin it back up again and it'll keep running. Think you can even reuse the same boot volume, but I set mine up again from scratch. Not sure why they delete it in the first place though, maybe due to capacity issues?
souldragon 5y ago
So I been using the service for a couple months now, and I been accumulating charges on my free account related to "Block Volume - Performance Units", which is small 0.03+ charges added to default "Balanced Setting" free disk volume each month, and 0.03 a day is smallest amount it accumulates, when hosting stuff on there I accumulated 0.55 cents. So if you want truly free, you need to select "Lower Cost" by placing the slider down to 0 VPU. Still I feel like it's a matter time with all these hidden not so free nobs until I get slammed with big cloud bills. Side note, can't delete my Tenancy (get an error) or my Account(waiting for something from support). Edit* $0.55 for this month, supposedly I owe $10.56 this year for these VPU's, but I am free tier so not sure how this is going work?
Saris 5y ago
If you use this make sure you sign up with a CC number that's limited to a few dollars. Also getting an instance is tough, they're in short supply.
noasaservice 5y ago
The only valid response to this is "Fuck Oracle". Friends do not let friends use anything relating to Oracle, VirtualBox, Java... Anything. No. Just no. Run, Don't walk.
- hamburglar 5y ago
  > Java Uh, whaaaat? I am a legit Java hater, but “friends don’t let friends use Java” is kinda a bizarre viewpoint. You know how much of our industry uses Java? I may prefer other languages but I’m not turning down a job based on them having settled on Java. It’s not PHP. :D
  - Dma54rhs 5y ago
    And php is even more popular ;)
    - hamburglar 5y ago
      Haha, touché
  - noasaservice 5y ago
    I should have specified Oracle Java; in any way, shape, or capacity. Keyword: Oracle. I figured I didn't have to explicitly state "Oracle Java", but pedants happen. OpenJDK/OpenJRE is good.
MightyOwl13 5y ago
Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. On a side note I do use their free tier stuff (the amd vps-es) to host my website and it's been fine. Used the ampere instance to transfer stuff between two rclone encrypted remotes and haven't had issues so far. Be careful though, the ampere instances aren't treated as "always free" so after the trial period ends, they get suspended and you either have to contact them or delete the instances and set them up from scratch... Had to spend a few hours setting up a book stack app instance again.
phs318u 5y ago
There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer. The brand “Oracle” has rapidly evolved into a signal of “badness” in the same way as white mould on fruit, or chromatic slime on meat. Stay away!
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer. "Which company's certifications should you go with, if you want to have a career in enterprise development or enterprise consulting?" "Which database should you go with in an enterprise setting for governmental projects, if you know that you'll be out the door in 2 years and don't want to deal with back pressure from ops/management in the mean time?" Though i get what you mean, for many those would also be red flags, such as not being allowed to use PostgreSQL due to some client's or organization's lack of experience with technologies like that and/or unwillingness to adopt anything new. As the saying goes: "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." where you can replace IBM with something else, depending on the regional and social circumstances (such as Oracle or MS products). For example, in my country, many governmental systems still run on the old .NET and Windows servers, which utterly baffles me, since in my experience dealing with those servers is harder than it would be in something like Linux based distros (though personally i still think that Windows does desktops a bit better in workstations).
  - phs318u 5y ago
    I should probably have qualified my first statement: There is no longer a reasonable question for which "Oracle" is a good answer. I agree that Oracle definitely used to be the right answer for enterprise development. These days however, the senior management panacea du-jour is AWS.
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      I'm not sure about that: there are companies in this country, which have a heavy buy in into Azure products and offerings. Similarly for Oracle, GCP and also the same way for AWS. And attempting to use the platform that's not adopted in the company (e.g. wanting AWS when Oracle is what's been used for years) is a non starter. The reasons for choosing one over the other are probably plentiful, as are the advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, i think that the cloud more or less always results in bunches of risks and vendor lock. Of course, one can also talk about the track record of each of the companies, but i think that all of them fail a litmus test in one way or another (Google with privacy issues, Microsoft with "embrace, extend, extinguish", Amazon with what working there is like, Oracle with their licensing). Most people out there want managed services for some reason, rather than to run their own FOSS software instances in containers or something. I guess maybe because they don't want to be the ones held responsible for something not working, since saying that "the Azure/GCP/AWS/Oracle service is down" absolves them of much responsibility.
treesknees 5y ago
Everyone here is dogging on Oracle, and they are justified probably, however I've been a user of the free tier for going on 7 months now. I run a few projects on an AMD instance and an Ampere instance, both fall under the Always Free tier (Ampere isn't "always free" but as part of Always Free, Oracle basically credits your account to the equivalent of 4xCPU and 24GB of RAM every 31 days.) I've never been charged anything, I don't even have a credit card on file for them to charge. I will say that the documentation around their services is much worse than AWS. I oftentimes struggle to figure out where to configure things or which services to use. Other than that, it's been fine. If you're really looking for a free VM, I would say check it out. One piece of advice I'd give is look at regions outside of the US. I selected their Toronto region and I've had zero issues provisioning new instances, whereas most people having trouble provisioning free-tier instances are in the more popular US regions. Don't run your critical business apps on it. But perfectly usable for personal projects and learning the cloud without spending money. Edit: Just to add, running a speedtest from my Toronto A1 instance to Los Angeles California Download: 374.64 Mbit/s Upload: 192.95 Mbit/s
gaze 5y ago
In the words of Michael Lewis, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?”
defaultname 5y ago
Quite a few negative replies [1], so here's a counterpoint -- Quite a few months back someone on here mentioned using the 24GB/4 core thing for a Minecraft server. While I knew Oracle had a cloud offering, I had never looked at it at all but this enticed me to give it a chance. Not for Minecraft, but lots of time I'm doing things like ETC1 compression of massive textures and I don't want to do it on my MBP. I signed up, got the month free trial (with $300 of credit), and spun up the three "always free" instances (two limited 1 core AMD servers and a 4 core 24GB ARM instance, though I couldn't get the latter until like a week after signing up as there was no availability at the time). All three of these have a public IPv4 which is just super surprising. These have been perfect since and I have had zero problems. Okay the sales guy in the first month was clearly just bothered by the whole thing (and somehow managed to cancel my account in the process of upgrading it to "paid"), but then it was fixed and everything has been perfect since. On that "personal" account I have had $0 of billing, and they are very clear on billing with up to the moment charting and allocation of every penny billed (not to mention that you can of course set alerts. You would have to really not be paying attention to get surprise billing from this). I've done backups, used volumes, and tried out loads of their services and they have "always free" quotas on loads of stuff. Hilariously I now use one of my AMD instances as the management console to run AWS CLI and kubectl controls for my AWS deployments. It worked perfectly on me. Since then I've done their "Oracle University" programs and then moved two of my client web applications to Oracle on separate paid accounts, where the pricing is incredibly reasonable (especially the lambda-style functionality which just blows me away). I plan on moving more. [1] I honestly wonder if some of the negative comments might be people trying to dissuade people from discovering something that seems to be Too Much of A Good Thing. Honestly hesitated posting a positive comment on the chance that if too many people run for freebies it might get the program noticed and clamped down on.
- dijit 5y ago
  Well. Seems like I have top comment at the moment and I’m definitely not trying to stop people from “having a good thing”. If it works for you, I’m actually happy! More diversity in the cloud space is excellent. But, I would feel bad if I didn’t share my experience and people got but the same as I did.
ineedasername 5y ago
I find myself thinking if a giant golden horse rolled up to the gates of Troy. I bet Larry Ellison is hiding somewhere nearby, having sent his racing ship of to sea without him.
abdusco 5y ago
Would video encoding be a good use of this free computing offer? How would 4 vCPU + 24GB hold up against x265 encoding? Would pegging CPU at 100% be allowed?
tykwell 5y ago
Hmmm
raxi 5y ago
One day they delete your free server and you won't be able to ask why, because you have no "support tokens" to submit a ticket.
8note 5y ago
Giving away suggests that I can plug the server in at home, where as it looks like they continue to own and operate the instance
newusertoday 5y ago
they rejected me despite verifying the transaction because the credit card is pre paid card.
mlatu 5y ago
oracle cloud services? so IOI for short?
saturn5k 5y ago
I've just created an ubuntu instance (2 core / 6 gigs / 50 gigs disk) without any issues. The process is a bit clunky and not too user friendly, but you have lots of customization options before you deploy your server. From what I can see, thee free tier gives you up to 4 cores / 24 gigs and up to 200 gigs of disk space. You can create up to 4 servers, or use all resources in 1 server. This seems to be the deal of the year.

162 points by Naac 5y ago

They're also giving free e-training and certs until the end of the year. If you don't already know Oracle there's not much time to study, but if you do you can sit some remote exams for free

zxspectrum1982 5y ago

I've run CoreMark PRO on one of those free Ampere 4-core + 24 GB RAM instances, running Oracle Linux 8.4. TL;DR: that free instance performs very very well. WORKLOAD RESULTS TABLE MultiCore SingleCore Workload Name (iter/s) (iter/s) Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- cjpeg-rose7-preset 625.00 172.41 3.63 core 6.86 1.72 3.99 linear_alg-mid-100x100-sp 595.24 154.80 3.85 loops-all-mid-10k-sp 29.96 7.80 3.84 nnet_test 28.09 8.45 3.32 parser-125k 190.48 50.00 3.81 radix2-big-64k 3289.47 848.90 3.87 sha-test 1000.00 277.78 3.60 zip-test 500.00 125.00 4.00 MARK RESULTS TABLE Mark Name MultiCore SingleCore Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- CoreMark-PRO 23719.00 6305.03 3.76 For comparison, this is the result on my laptop: Intel Core i7-10850H @ 2.70 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and RHEL 8.4 x86_64: WORKLOAD RESULTS TABLE MultiCore SingleCore Workload Name (iter/s) (iter/s) Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- cjpeg-rose7-preset 833.33 166.67 5.00 core 10.31 1.99 5.18 linear_alg-mid-100x100-sp 1063.83 236.97 4.49 loops-all-mid-10k-sp 34.29 8.55 4.01 nnet_test 36.10 8.64 4.18 parser-125k 111.11 23.81 4.67 radix2-big-64k 2890.17 716.85 4.03 sha-test 909.09 208.33 4.36 zip-test 666.67 200.00 3.33 MARK RESULTS TABLE Mark Name MultiCore SingleCore Scaling ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- CoreMark-PRO 27058.61 6251.38 4.33 So that free Ampere instance performs slightly better than my i7-10850H on single-core, and just 10% slower on multi-core (and that's considering my i7-10850H has 6 cores, while the Ampere has only 4 cores!!!).

discardedrefuse 5y ago

Necro-ing this post because I, too, was tempted to check this out. So I opened an Oracle Cloud account on the 10th, though I never created any instances. All I did was setup MFA on the account (which, BTW, was obscenely difficult to enable) and look around a bit. Oracle makes you add a credit card during account creation and they do a $1.00 temporary charge to make sure the card is valid. Well, here we are 3 days later and I have 3 x $1.00 charges pending on my credit card from Oracle (2 on the 10th and 1 today). I don't know if these charges will actually post to my card or disappear like they're supposed to; but this doesn't look good.

sgt 5y ago

Can you run a small business on this, indefinitey, for free?

heavyset_go 5y ago
It's free because no one would choose them over AWS, GCP, etc if it cost anything. The second they think they no longer have to dangle free things in front of developers in order to get their business, it will no longer be free.
andrewxdiamond 5y ago
Indefinitely? Mmmmmmm probably not. This is clearly a loss-leader for them to draw in more customers, so you can’t guarantee it won’t change
- nefitty 5y ago
  This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down the line I might have an informed opinion to share in business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty smart.
  - outside1234 5y ago
    Or they are just totally failing in the cloud and this is an indication of that. Also not hard to imagine the whole cloud getting shut down and/or sold to Salesforce (and shut down)
    - hamburglar 5y ago
      They’re definitely not doing well in the “casual cloud user” space, which hurts them because nobody is familiar with their console and APIs. Everyone knows how to do stuff on AWS because we’ve all done personal throwaway projects there. Somewhere else in this thread someone posted their notes on the confusing console, and reading through it, it doesn’t look any more complicated than AWS to me, but familiarity is valuable. Maybe this is a play for that type of usage.

bborud 5y ago

With Oracle you always read the fine print. I wouldn't risk touching this with your ten foot pole.

ransom1538 5y ago
It's hard to build yachts by giving away free machines.
- bborud 5y ago
  There is more money in treating customers even just slightly better.
- worik 5y ago
  "He gives the kids free samples because he knows full well that today's young, innocent faces will be tomorrow's clientele"
gajus 5y ago
If you are a startup and using Oracle, then your are NGMI Use common sense
- 1_player 5y ago
  "Not Going To Make It", for people who are not into the latest trendy acronyms.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Thanks. I'd expanded it to "Not Getting My Investment", which might also be fitting.
hermitdev 5y ago
Free, you say? Oracle, you say? No, no, the price is too high.

quiffledwerg 5y ago

The large print giveth. The small print taketh away.

hi_hello 5y ago
Thus is the way of the Oracle
- sgt 5y ago
  I love how HN is extremely skeptical towards Oracle.

eatonphil 5y ago

Lest folks not read the actual article, STH is pretty happy about this offering: > To us, this is a big deal. This is perhaps one of the best “free” instances that one can get. Something that we really like about Oracle’s Always Free tier is that one can use it without being as worried about overages as with Amazon’s offering. AWS has a size advantage, but Oracle has a great Always Free Tier offering.

CoastalCoder 5y ago
I don't notice anything in the STH article about the license terms. (Sorry if I'm just missing it.) Given Oracle's reputation, no evaluation is complete without a thorough examination of those terms, ideally by a competent lawyer.
- mihcsab 5y ago
  You have to manually upgrade your account to get charged.
  - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
    I bet you don't need to upgrade your account to receive nastygrams from Oracle legal, though.
    - amock 5y ago
      I've had an account for a couple of years and I might have received a survey email once, but otherwise I have received only things like notifications about infrastructure changes and there haven't been many of those.
- westpfelia 5y ago
  If you are running a business sure. But personally I just would like a beefy cloud instance to run some things off of for personal use. Kinda perfect for that.

svdr 5y ago

The offer is here: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Hjfrf 5y ago

Nice. I assumed cryptocurrency fraudsters would stop these kinds of offerings for the near future.

chc4 5y ago
You have to provide a valid credit card in order to sign up for the free account, which probably helps stymie abuse.

SimianSci 5y ago

Enticing, but a part of me is still very hesitant to get in bed with Oracle. They've gained a reputation of trying to lock customers in so that their legal department can "innovate" more ways of squeezing money out of them. The common joke remains that Oracle is actually just two law-firms in a software-company trenchcoat. Until this reputation changes, any offer they present smells suspiciously like a baited hook.

_jal 5y ago
Never invite a vampire into your home is timeless advice.
smarx007 5y ago
Had IBM Cloud account for a while. At some point, they started to attach a notice to a monthly $0 bill along the lines: if you card gets declined, we will fine you $25 and if you don't pay in 7 days, we will fine you further $50. Easiest account termination decision I have ever had. I guess the first email from Oracle "we are making routine changes to the T&Cs and our privacy policy" will be the end of my account.
- thriftwy 5y ago
  Is this even legal? In most jurisdictions, you have to be a government to fine anybody. Sending frivolous charges may be considered fraud and also lead to chargebacks.
  - evandwight 5y ago
    It's not a government fine. It's just an agreement in the contract specifying a payment is due if your card declines.
    - thriftwy 5y ago
      I'm not sure that is legal either. You can charge for some product or service but, unless you are a licensed bank, you can't lend out money and charge for overdraft, which is basically something they're doing here. And even a bank can only do it against accounts open in that bank.

m4xm4n 5y ago

nice try Oracle!

Tepix 5y ago

That's a sweet deal. How much is 100GB extra disk space per month?

matthewaveryusa 5y ago
2.55 dollars/month for an extra 100GB -- you get 200GB free but they are hard to come buy because of where they are located. I ended up getting the entire free tier as expected, except for the storage which wasn't available in the region I selected. I'm _very_ happy with the setup, and here's a silly github workflow to deploy to oracle cloud: https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/oracle_actions https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/oracle_actions
Const-me 5y ago
Block storage is $0.0425 / GB / month with ”balanced” I/O performance level whatever that means, file storage is $0.30 / GB / month. Block volumes are attached to a specific virtual machine which views that thing as a local disk. File storage is deployed on the virtual network, that thing is visible to all VMs in the network as an NFS server.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

chomp 5y ago

I played around with Oracles free tier. When you first sign up, you must choose a “home” region. You cannot add another region on the free plan. These awesome free instances are very limited stock. You have no way of knowing if the region you choose has stock of the desired instances before you select the region. You may not change your “home” region. You will get sales phone calls. Caveat emptor.

mihcsab 5y ago
If you wait a bit, you can get what you want to try.
smarx007 5y ago
You can change the zone within the region. There were no free Ampere instances in the Frankfurt AZ1, I found them in AZ2. Though it only works for the Ampere. 1vCPU x86 VM can only be spun up in AZ1.
- chomp 5y ago
  Gotcha. I had signed up in a US region and there was nary an ARM server to be found. I was quite disappointed. Then sales people reminded me of my disappointment weeks after.
  - raffraffraff 5y ago
    I signed up months ago so I could get enough virtual crap to start a "working" k8s cluster for messing around with, doing CV KA etc. Haven't used it yet (doing other stuff) but am planning on kicking off next month. I got a single salesy email, and I replied that the account is for personal use, I have no money and no intention of monetising my tire-kicking, so it's forever free-tier. That was the end of it. You also have to explicitly flip a switch so they are allowed to charge you. If you don't, you simply can't deploy anything beyond the free tier. That's my understanding of their documentation of the free tier, but that was made clear enough.
alx__ 5y ago
So when i sign up I should the phone number of my nemesis? Noted.

voz_ 5y ago

I'd rather pay more at every possible instance than interact with Oracle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

graton 5y ago

1) The article is from May 2021 2) When I checked today the free Ampere instance was a 1 core, 6GB of memory, 1 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 2 virtual NICs. Edit: I spoke too soon. After selecting it I was able to increase the CPU count to 4 and 24GB of memory. I provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04, logged in and I see 4 CPUs and 24GB of memory. Cool. The free x86 instance is 1 core, 1GB of memory, 0.48 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 1 virtual NIC.

PaulHoule 5y ago

https://www.shortform.com/blog/48-laws-of-power-law-40-despise-the-free-lunch/ https://www.shortform.com/blog/48-laws-of-power-law-40-despi...

dijit 5y ago

Be extremely wary of Oracle free tiers. They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance. This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually. They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency). I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice. I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the billing system. Caveat Emptor. EDIT: in case someone thinks I am joking. This was one of the packs: https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E

rozap 5y ago
Oh my god. Oracle having my address and credit card number is a nightmare scenario.
- walrus01 5y ago
  I wonder what happens if you sign up with a fake name, semi-disposable email address and a prepaid visa gift card that has $3.50 remaining balance on it.
  - john2010 5y ago
    accounts get cancelled after a few weeks!
  - phonebanshee 5y ago
    Afaik AWS and GCP refuse visa gift cards, although it's been a while since I tried. Wouldn't surprise me to hear Oracle is the same.
  - imalerba 5y ago
    Signed up with Revolut disposable cards, will see

nvaoz 5y ago

If you want desperate salesmen calling and emailing you every day for months, this is your best option!

gjsman-1000 5y ago

Been using it for months for a Minecraft server. Runs 10+ players with mods without much difficulty. I limited the RAM usage to 6GB though so that the Garbage Collector doesn't go nuts.

andai 5y ago
Wait, are you saying Java performs worse if you give it more memory to work with?
- dijit 5y ago
  It can. GC pauses cause stuttering. More memory is a longer GC pause. This is only the case if you allocate and deallocate a lot. Also: never go larger than 32GiB on heap else you’ll end up with 64bit inter pointers: that will seriously degrade performance.
- sulam 5y ago
  This very much depends on the GC you're using. But yes, a full GC will take longer the more memory you have. Therefore you want to avoid full GCs like the plague.
- sz4kerto 5y ago
  No. More accurately: with very large heaps the default performance characteristics of the GC might be different than what you’d like it to be. For example you might get huge throughput but occasional long GC pauses. But it’s all tunable.
- winrid 5y ago
  No. A bigger heap means more work for a memory manager. If you just give it more memory, but your app doesn't use it, no harm done. Honestly Java in 2021 can handle huge heaps pretty well. Not sure which GC they are running.
schmorptron 5y ago
Uuuh, good idea!

bee_rider 5y ago

Of course, nobody really likes Oracle. But it is pretty cool and impressive that Ampere is able to trade blows favorably with something the size of Amazon.

Taywee 5y ago

"Oracle" and "free" in the same sentence raises alarms. I've seen many years of Oracle filling their "free" offerings with horrible trap doors into massive amounts of financial obligation that are way too easy to accidentally fall through.

rowanG077 5y ago

It's a trap send no reply.

renewiltord 5y ago

How will any of these be available? If they're free and unrestricted, people will squat them and never give them up. Why would you ever give up any of these? And if you don't need payment details, you can just make multiple accounts to squat them.

Jansen312 5y ago
If AWS can pull the plugs on paying customer earlier this year due to political reasons, why wouldn't Larry do so to free tiers for business reasons. Those squatters will get evicted easily just like any squatters in America. Since they have very limited means to engage lawyers, every courts in America will hand Larry a hall pass easily. As many have said, you just simply don't invite vampires in no matter how voluptuous and scantily-dressed or muscular Tom-Cruise-handsome.

marcodiego 5y ago

"Instances". I thought they're getting rid of surplus.

Tomte 5y ago

I find the Oracle dashboard very confusing. My notes: https://www.2uo.de/Computing/setting-up-a-free-server-in-oracle-cloud/ https://www.2uo.de/Computing/setting-up-a-free-server-in-ora... Also this: https://www.2uo.de/Computing/firewall-in-oracle-cloud/ https://www.2uo.de/Computing/firewall-in-oracle-cloud/

_red 5y ago

Can't even sign up. Gives generic error about "payment / registration failed" - its a regular credit card that I use everywhere. Oh well...kinda glad to be honest. Knowing Oracle it will eventually become a nightmare anyway (whoops, we accidentally billed you $70 for the free-tier, but you need to manually call this long-distance number between the hours of 9am-4pm to reverse the charge and this also happens to be our sales dept)

slig 5y ago
Had this exactly error couple of weeks ago. Tried multiple good CC and it never worked. Blessing in disguise.

artembugara 5y ago

Oracle for Startups gives 70% off for 2 years: https://www.oracle.com/startup/explore-the-program/ https://www.oracle.com/startup/explore-the-program/

nieve 5y ago
I wonder how many startups hit that 3.3x price increase at 25 months and scramble to move elsewhere because the costs were still higher than they should have been at 70% off?
- artembugara 5y ago
  It cost a lot to move elsewhere. Usually.

Tomte 5y ago

You can install Debian (and other distributions) by downloading the netboot.xyz EFI boot image, then open a "cloud connection", reboot the instance, press ESC, and then boot from file.

freemint 5y ago

During the last ARM HPC User Group conf i was able to get my hands a 160 core instance, i was shocked, holy moly do they beat Xeon when it comes to SAT solving in my test with HordeSAT.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

frankjr 5y ago

I signed a few months ago and overall the experience have been positive. Initially there was an issue with the availability of the A1 instances (Switzerland North) but after a few trials I managed to grab one. You also get some free credit to spend during the first month ($300 I believe) so I was running with 32 vCPUs, 128GB ram, and 32Gbps network. I have now downscaled to the free tier. I was a bit disappointed with the selection of operating systems but fortunately you can upload your own image (QCOW2) and create an instance from it (I'm running Alpine now). You can even upload your VMs directly from VirtualBox but I haven't tried that (right click -> Export to OCI). Getting IPv6 working was a bit of a hassle because it's not enabled by default and you need to make changes in multiple places [0] but it works fine now. There's a good enough Cost Analysis section where you can see your current usage broken down to days and you can create alerts based on that. Overall I find the Administration Console to be more pleasant than Amazon's but still miles behind Scaleway's. [0] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/ipv6-on-oracle-cloud-infrastructure https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/ipv6-on-o...

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

at the end of the day its Oracle... Bite me once, shame on you; bite me twice.. shame on me. I dont know one person who has not got an oracle hate story. As long as Larry has his billion $ yacht, the clientelle cant go to hell!

hvgk 5y ago

Your kidneys are probably mentioned in the small print.

notreallyserio 5y ago

All, How does the performance on these compare to similar VMs at other clouds? Anyone here on HN published benchmarks? Thanks in advance, Barry Elisson

pt_PT_guy 5y ago

even in US I only see 1vcore, 6gb ram option.

NmAmDa 5y ago

After the trial ends, your ARM instance will get deleted and you will be back to free tier offer. You can use 300$ to try with. You have to upgrade to paying accounr manually so you are not going to have surprise bill if you stick to free tier always and never upgrades. But good luck finding arm instance in your home zone because the demand is very high so you have to keep trying from time to time. There are some people using scripts to automate the instance availability and registration so they can catch the opportunity.

pikdum 5y ago
After it's deleted, you can spin it back up again and it'll keep running. Think you can even reuse the same boot volume, but I set mine up again from scratch. Not sure why they delete it in the first place though, maybe due to capacity issues?

souldragon 5y ago

So I been using the service for a couple months now, and I been accumulating charges on my free account related to "Block Volume - Performance Units", which is small 0.03+ charges added to default "Balanced Setting" free disk volume each month, and 0.03 a day is smallest amount it accumulates, when hosting stuff on there I accumulated 0.55 cents. So if you want truly free, you need to select "Lower Cost" by placing the slider down to 0 VPU. Still I feel like it's a matter time with all these hidden not so free nobs until I get slammed with big cloud bills. Side note, can't delete my Tenancy (get an error) or my Account(waiting for something from support). Edit* $0.55 for this month, supposedly I owe $10.56 this year for these VPU's, but I am free tier so not sure how this is going work?

Saris 5y ago

If you use this make sure you sign up with a CC number that's limited to a few dollars. Also getting an instance is tough, they're in short supply.

noasaservice 5y ago

The only valid response to this is "Fuck Oracle". Friends do not let friends use anything relating to Oracle, VirtualBox, Java... Anything. No. Just no. Run, Don't walk.

hamburglar 5y ago
> Java Uh, whaaaat? I am a legit Java hater, but “friends don’t let friends use Java” is kinda a bizarre viewpoint. You know how much of our industry uses Java? I may prefer other languages but I’m not turning down a job based on them having settled on Java. It’s not PHP. :D
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  And php is even more popular ;)
  - hamburglar 5y ago
    Haha, touché
- noasaservice 5y ago
  I should have specified Oracle Java; in any way, shape, or capacity. Keyword: Oracle. I figured I didn't have to explicitly state "Oracle Java", but pedants happen. OpenJDK/OpenJRE is good.

MightyOwl13 5y ago

Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. On a side note I do use their free tier stuff (the amd vps-es) to host my website and it's been fine. Used the ampere instance to transfer stuff between two rclone encrypted remotes and haven't had issues so far. Be careful though, the ampere instances aren't treated as "always free" so after the trial period ends, they get suspended and you either have to contact them or delete the instances and set them up from scratch... Had to spend a few hours setting up a book stack app instance again.

phs318u 5y ago

There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer. The brand “Oracle” has rapidly evolved into a signal of “badness” in the same way as white mould on fruit, or chromatic slime on meat. Stay away!

KronisLV 5y ago
> There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer. "Which company's certifications should you go with, if you want to have a career in enterprise development or enterprise consulting?" "Which database should you go with in an enterprise setting for governmental projects, if you know that you'll be out the door in 2 years and don't want to deal with back pressure from ops/management in the mean time?" Though i get what you mean, for many those would also be red flags, such as not being allowed to use PostgreSQL due to some client's or organization's lack of experience with technologies like that and/or unwillingness to adopt anything new. As the saying goes: "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." where you can replace IBM with something else, depending on the regional and social circumstances (such as Oracle or MS products). For example, in my country, many governmental systems still run on the old .NET and Windows servers, which utterly baffles me, since in my experience dealing with those servers is harder than it would be in something like Linux based distros (though personally i still think that Windows does desktops a bit better in workstations).
- phs318u 5y ago
  I should probably have qualified my first statement: There is no longer a reasonable question for which "Oracle" is a good answer. I agree that Oracle definitely used to be the right answer for enterprise development. These days however, the senior management panacea du-jour is AWS.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that: there are companies in this country, which have a heavy buy in into Azure products and offerings. Similarly for Oracle, GCP and also the same way for AWS. And attempting to use the platform that's not adopted in the company (e.g. wanting AWS when Oracle is what's been used for years) is a non starter. The reasons for choosing one over the other are probably plentiful, as are the advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, i think that the cloud more or less always results in bunches of risks and vendor lock. Of course, one can also talk about the track record of each of the companies, but i think that all of them fail a litmus test in one way or another (Google with privacy issues, Microsoft with "embrace, extend, extinguish", Amazon with what working there is like, Oracle with their licensing). Most people out there want managed services for some reason, rather than to run their own FOSS software instances in containers or something. I guess maybe because they don't want to be the ones held responsible for something not working, since saying that "the Azure/GCP/AWS/Oracle service is down" absolves them of much responsibility.

treesknees 5y ago

Everyone here is dogging on Oracle, and they are justified probably, however I've been a user of the free tier for going on 7 months now. I run a few projects on an AMD instance and an Ampere instance, both fall under the Always Free tier (Ampere isn't "always free" but as part of Always Free, Oracle basically credits your account to the equivalent of 4xCPU and 24GB of RAM every 31 days.) I've never been charged anything, I don't even have a credit card on file for them to charge. I will say that the documentation around their services is much worse than AWS. I oftentimes struggle to figure out where to configure things or which services to use. Other than that, it's been fine. If you're really looking for a free VM, I would say check it out. One piece of advice I'd give is look at regions outside of the US. I selected their Toronto region and I've had zero issues provisioning new instances, whereas most people having trouble provisioning free-tier instances are in the more popular US regions. Don't run your critical business apps on it. But perfectly usable for personal projects and learning the cloud without spending money. Edit: Just to add, running a speedtest from my Toronto A1 instance to Los Angeles California Download: 374.64 Mbit/s Upload: 192.95 Mbit/s

gaze 5y ago

In the words of Michael Lewis, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?”

defaultname 5y ago

Quite a few negative replies [1], so here's a counterpoint -- Quite a few months back someone on here mentioned using the 24GB/4 core thing for a Minecraft server. While I knew Oracle had a cloud offering, I had never looked at it at all but this enticed me to give it a chance. Not for Minecraft, but lots of time I'm doing things like ETC1 compression of massive textures and I don't want to do it on my MBP. I signed up, got the month free trial (with $300 of credit), and spun up the three "always free" instances (two limited 1 core AMD servers and a 4 core 24GB ARM instance, though I couldn't get the latter until like a week after signing up as there was no availability at the time). All three of these have a public IPv4 which is just super surprising. These have been perfect since and I have had zero problems. Okay the sales guy in the first month was clearly just bothered by the whole thing (and somehow managed to cancel my account in the process of upgrading it to "paid"), but then it was fixed and everything has been perfect since. On that "personal" account I have had $0 of billing, and they are very clear on billing with up to the moment charting and allocation of every penny billed (not to mention that you can of course set alerts. You would have to really not be paying attention to get surprise billing from this). I've done backups, used volumes, and tried out loads of their services and they have "always free" quotas on loads of stuff. Hilariously I now use one of my AMD instances as the management console to run AWS CLI and kubectl controls for my AWS deployments. It worked perfectly on me. Since then I've done their "Oracle University" programs and then moved two of my client web applications to Oracle on separate paid accounts, where the pricing is incredibly reasonable (especially the lambda-style functionality which just blows me away). I plan on moving more. [1] I honestly wonder if some of the negative comments might be people trying to dissuade people from discovering something that seems to be Too Much of A Good Thing. Honestly hesitated posting a positive comment on the chance that if too many people run for freebies it might get the program noticed and clamped down on.

dijit 5y ago
Well. Seems like I have top comment at the moment and I’m definitely not trying to stop people from “having a good thing”. If it works for you, I’m actually happy! More diversity in the cloud space is excellent. But, I would feel bad if I didn’t share my experience and people got but the same as I did.

ineedasername 5y ago

I find myself thinking if a giant golden horse rolled up to the gates of Troy. I bet Larry Ellison is hiding somewhere nearby, having sent his racing ship of to sea without him.

abdusco 5y ago

Would video encoding be a good use of this free computing offer? How would 4 vCPU + 24GB hold up against x265 encoding? Would pegging CPU at 100% be allowed?

tykwell 5y ago

Hmmm

raxi 5y ago

One day they delete your free server and you won't be able to ask why, because you have no "support tokens" to submit a ticket.

8note 5y ago

Giving away suggests that I can plug the server in at home, where as it looks like they continue to own and operate the instance

newusertoday 5y ago

they rejected me despite verifying the transaction because the credit card is pre paid card.

mlatu 5y ago

oracle cloud services? so IOI for short?

saturn5k 5y ago

I've just created an ubuntu instance (2 core / 6 gigs / 50 gigs disk) without any issues. The process is a bit clunky and not too user friendly, but you have lots of customization options before you deploy your server. From what I can see, thee free tier gives you up to 4 cores / 24 gigs and up to 200 gigs of disk space. You can create up to 4 servers, or use all resources in 1 server. This seems to be the deal of the year.