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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 serv

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.
- defaultname 5y ago
  For sure, and I'm not disputing your experience at all but there are hundreds of much vaguer "they're a bad company" style posts that don't have direct experience though. It's entirely possible that they've improved some of the cost monitoring and management facilities as well. Under "Governance and Administration" you can set a budget -- notably budgets are alerts and not hard budgets, so one should act accordingly -- not only based on actual spend, but even for period forecast spend. It's a great rapid awareness if you accidentally enable a pay feature. There are also regularly updated graphs showing the daily spend charted by source of cost, along with multiple-per-day CSVs with billing details. Another way the Oracle cloud actually helps is that it actually isolates you to a single region (you have to go through a process to do otherwise), so it's harder to have the situation people would encounter on Amazon where they'd accidentally create some resource off in some other region and then it's effectively invisible but costly (though AWS now has the global dashboard that really improved that). What is "free" or not could be clearer. For instance they have a terminology issue with a conflict between "Free tier" and "always free". Sometimes they use the former to refer to things during the trial period. Sometimes they use the latter to refer to resources that are free forever even after you've upgraded to an ostensibly pay account. It is confusing. And they make the two AMD instances just straight "always free", but for the ARM instance they give a monthly CPU/memory credit that allows you to run it for 31 days. And then you have to search on various other things you regularly do figure out what is free or not, and that information is dispersed. For instance you can have so many volume images beyond which they are charged, etc. Alas, I've been extremely pleased with the service. The console is a bit clunky in places but it works.

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.

defaultname 5y ago
For sure, and I'm not disputing your experience at all but there are hundreds of much vaguer "they're a bad company" style posts that don't have direct experience though. It's entirely possible that they've improved some of the cost monitoring and management facilities as well. Under "Governance and Administration" you can set a budget -- notably budgets are alerts and not hard budgets, so one should act accordingly -- not only based on actual spend, but even for period forecast spend. It's a great rapid awareness if you accidentally enable a pay feature. There are also regularly updated graphs showing the daily spend charted by source of cost, along with multiple-per-day CSVs with billing details. Another way the Oracle cloud actually helps is that it actually isolates you to a single region (you have to go through a process to do otherwise), so it's harder to have the situation people would encounter on Amazon where they'd accidentally create some resource off in some other region and then it's effectively invisible but costly (though AWS now has the global dashboard that really improved that). What is "free" or not could be clearer. For instance they have a terminology issue with a conflict between "Free tier" and "always free". Sometimes they use the former to refer to things during the trial period. Sometimes they use the latter to refer to resources that are free forever even after you've upgraded to an ostensibly pay account. It is confusing. And they make the two AMD instances just straight "always free", but for the ARM instance they give a monthly CPU/memory credit that allows you to run it for 31 days. And then you have to search on various other things you regularly do figure out what is free or not, and that information is dispersed. For instance you can have so many volume images beyond which they are charged, etc. Alas, I've been extremely pleased with the service. The console is a bit clunky in places but it works.