Alternatively, if your goal is non-production exploration of low-level details of the system as described in this article, or even just learning the ropes of IB

Alternatively, if your goal is non-production exploration of low-level details of the system as described in this article, or even just learning the ropes of IBM i, another option is to buy an old POWER6 or POWER7 system on eBay that's licensed for virtualization and a reasonably recent version of the base IBM i OS, then use it to create disposable evaluation VMs running whatever additional extra-cost software you want to play with (time-limited evaluation copies of most first-party IBM i software are freely downloadable from IBM's Web site). While these systems won't run anything newer than IBM i V7R2 (POWER6) or V7R3 (POWER7), they're likely to be both faster and cheaper than inexpensive cloud options. Consider: In 2017, I paid $1,700 for a POWER6 server (2 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, half a dozen 137 GB hard drives) with virtualization and IBM i licenses. The cost estimator on IBM's Power Virtual Server site suggests that their cheapest VM capable of running any version of IBM i they support (0.25 CPU cores, 2 GB RAM, 35 GB storage) costs around $400/month.