Oracle Cloud Free Tier

raindog308 · September 2019

Announced today: https://www-zdnet-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/oracle-introduces-free-autonomous-database-and-cloud-services/

Haven't looked extensively at it, but some interesting things in the "always free" tier:

Two virtual machines with 1/8 OPCU and 1 GB memory each.
2 databases total, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage (but you'll need to learn to be an Oracle DBA :-)
volumes with 100GB total, 10GB object, 10GB archive
Load Balancer, 1 instance, 10 Mbps bandwidth.
Monitoring, 500 million ingestion datapoints, 1 billion retrieval datapoints.
Notifications, 1 million delivery options per month, 1,000 emails sent per month.
Outbound Data Transfer, 10 TB per month.
Is Oracle Cloud Free Tier available in all countries? Yes, Oracle Cloud Free Tier is currently available worldwide.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free

Chuck · September 2019

10 Mbps bandwidth killed it?

raindog308 · September 2019

Chuck said: 10 Mbps bandwidth killed it.

Not sure if that's external egress or internal load balancer.

sanvit · September 2019

raindog308 said: Outbound Data Transfer, 10 TB per month.

This is awesome!

sanvit · September 2019

@raindog308 said:

Chuck said: 10 Mbps bandwidth killed it.

Not sure if that's external egress or internal load balancer.

It seems like only the LB is 10Mbps?

Networking: Includes one VNIC with one public IP address and up to 480 Mbps network bandwidth

https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/FreeTier/resourceref.htm

donli · September 2019

Oracle giving away something for free?....

creep · September 2019

why not? free is always a good thing. Don't complain.

raindog308 · September 2019

donli said: Oracle giving away something for free?....

HackedServer · September 2019

Their DNS is also a great deal if you have a lot of zones but not many lookups, as they only charge for lookups. Many other places charge for zones or have a zone limit.
I've been using it for a year or so I think. Works great, just have to deal with Oracle's inability to make a good control panel ever.

dragon1993 · September 2019

Denied my revolut card

doghouch · September 2019

@dragon1993 said:
Denied my revolut card

Use a real card

creep · September 2019

@dragon1993 said:
Denied my revolut card

looks like they are denying all debit cards, be it genuine from your bank or any virtual cards.

need to be a valid credit card.

james50a · September 2019

Huh neat. Thanks for sharing this

Foul · September 2019

creep said: looks like they are denying all debit cards, be it genuine from your bank or any virtual cards.

Worked just fine for my debit card

vimalware · September 2019

Signed up for Mumbai zone.
Micro tier VM deployed.

username : ubuntu

vimalware · September 2019

processor   : 1
vendor_id   : AuthenticAMD
cpu family  : 23
model       : 1
model name  : AMD EPYC 7551 32-Core Processor
stepping    : 2
microcode   : 0x1000065
cpu MHz     : 1996.242
cache size  : 512 KB
physical id : 0
siblings    : 2
core id     : 0
cpu cores   : 1
apicid      : 1
initial apicid  : 1
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 13
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm rep_good nopl xtopology cpuid extd_apicid tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand hypervisor lahf_lm cmp_legacy cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw topoext perfctr_core ssbd ibpb vmmcall fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 rdseed adx smap clflushopt sha_ni xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 virt_ssbd arat
bugs        : fxsave_leak sysret_ss_attrs null_seg spectre_v1 spectre_v2 spec_store_bypass
bogomips    : 3992.48
TLB size    : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Edit: network is a little throttled on the micros.
Couldn't pull more than 50Mbit from Linode Mumbai 100MB testfile.
Perhaps the other regular instance 'shapes'(types) will be better.

LTniger · September 2019

vimalware said: model name : AMD EPYC 7551 32-Core Processor

Damn! That's some nice beef jerky right here. It's nice to see AMD product adopted by such beghemot like Oracle.

creep · September 2019

@Foul said:

creep said: looks like they are denying all debit cards, be it genuine from your bank or any virtual cards.

Worked just fine for my debit card

that's weird. I tried to use Maybank (Malaysia's number 1 bank, and the best bank in South East Asia) visa debit card, they deducted a dollar from my bank but still declining my sign up. Even a staff don't have idea why this happen, and just tell me to "use another card" or try another time.

Edit: just chat with Oracle Indian guy. He said there should be two authorization, first its $1 , if it succeed, second reauthorization will attempt to charge you a random amount about $50. So, if your debit card has less than $50, your transaction will fail. I dont know if he's joking, but that what he said. fucking $50 for re-authorization.

rm_ · September 2019

The last I got is:

Hello Oracle Cloud User,
Thank you for signing up for an Oracle Cloud Account. We are reviewing your request and may reach out to you shortly by phone or by email if we need additional inputs.

And nothing after that. The web page said this can take 15 minutes, which have already passed.

vimalware · September 2019

A snippet of what the CPU steal looks like on the micro instance during apt dist-upgrade.
To be expected. looks ok

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 1  0      0 168256  55028 557844    0    0    31    84   62  113  0  0 97  0  2
 6  0      0 169316  55080 556796    0    0   356   132  538 2491  9 11 18  1 61
 1  0      0 168812  55132 556812    0    0    68     0 1699 3338  6 15 22  0 57
 0  1      0 158392  55460 557000    0    0   184  3592 1357 3177  5 14 24  3 55
 3  0      0 154156  56020 560620    0    0  1076  6832 1302 2453  6 13 26  4 52
 2  0      0 150828  56052 570764    0    0  2040   236  962 2506  8 12 15  0 65
 2  0      0 139320  56052 581740    0    0  2048 13356  951 1854  7 12 18  1 62
 3  0      0 123604  56052 595444    0    0  1792  6740  994 1882  8 12 16  0 64
 3  0      0 113104  56052 607640    0    0  2048 15640  964 1793  8 11 20  1 60
 3  0      0 100012  56052 620012    0    0  2048  6872  917 1717  8 11 19  0 62
 2  0      0  88676  56060 632136    0    0  2048   204  945 1805  8 11 17  0 64

Harambe · September 2019

It didn't like my Visa debit either.

Initial thoughts: network isn't great on the free instances, ~50Mbps (US-West Phoenix)

marrco · September 2019

no debian images

smile93 · September 2019

@creep said:

@Foul said:

creep said: looks like they are denying all debit cards, be it genuine from your bank or any virtual cards.

Worked just fine for my debit card

that's weird. I tried to use Maybank (Malaysia's number 1 bank, and the best bank in South East Asia) visa debit card, they deducted a dollar from my bank but still declining my sign up. Even a staff don't have idea why this happen, and just tell me to "use another card" or try another time.

Edit: just chat with Oracle Indian guy. He said there should be two authorization, first its $1 , if it succeed, second reauthorization will attempt to charge you a random amount about $50. So, if your debit card has less than $50, your transaction will fail. I dont know if he's joking, but that what he said. fucking $50 for re-authorization.

They take only credit card but not prepaid credit card.

marrco · September 2019

@Harambe said:
It didn't like my Visa debit either.

Initial thoughts: network isn't great on the free instances, ~50Mbps (US-West Phoenix)

setup one in Frankfurt (DE - Europe)

network ain't great here too:

Download speed from CacheFly nearest mirror: 5.66MB/s
Download speed from Linode Frankfurt: 5.54MB/s
Download speed from Linode London: 5.52MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb Netherlands: 5.55MB/s
Download speed from Prometeus Milano (ita): 5.59MB/s
Download speed from OVH: 7.05MB/s
Download speed from Frankfurt, Germany (Tele2): 5.49MB/s
Download speed from Zagreb, Croatia (Tele2): 5.62MB/s
Download speed from Amsterdam, Netherlands (Tele2): 5.53MB/s
Download speed from Kista, Sweden (Tele2): 5.63MB/s
Download speed from Germany (hetzner): 5.55MB/s
Download speed from Frankfurt, DE (Vultr): 5.53MB/s
Download speed from Amsterdam, NL (Vultr): 5.54MB/s
Download speed from Paris, France (Vultr): 5.54MB/s
Download speed from London, UK (Vultr): 5.54MB/s
Download speed from Roost, Luxembourg (BuyVM): 5.64MB/s
I/O speed : 56.9 MB/s

Harambe · September 2019

So yeah, not getting anything high performance for free, but it's free so I can't complain. 5.5MB/s on the network (up & down), 50-55MB/s i/o cap. Ubuntu or CentOS are the only options, Debian image would be nice.

Assuming they actually keep the free tier alive long term it'll work great for monitoring, some offsite storage (assuming you don't need to store or retrieve anything quickly), small sites, etc.

rm_ · September 2019

rm_ said: We are reviewing your request and may reach out to you shortly by phone or by email if we need additional inputs.

Contacted the live chat, then shortly got a voice call from Ireland (!), and after a little chat got my account created.

creep · September 2019

@rm_ said:

rm_ said: We are reviewing your request and may reach out to you shortly by phone or by email if we need additional inputs.

Contacted the live chat, then shortly got a voice call from Ireland (!), and after a little chat got my account created.

do you use a debit card?

marrco · September 2019

The new Always Free program includes the essentials users need to build and test applications in the cloud: Oracle Autonomous Database, Compute VMs, Block Volumes, Object and Archive Storage, and Load Balancer. Specifications include:

• 2 Autonomous Databases (Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing), each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage
• 2 Compute VMs, each with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory
• 2 Block Volumes, 100 GB total, with up to 5 free backups
• 10 GB Object Storage, 10 GB Archive Storage, and 50,000/month API requests
• 1 Load Balancer, 10 Mbps bandwidth
• 10 TB/month Outbound Data Transfer
• 500 million ingestion Datapoints and 1 billion Datapoints for Monitoring Service
• 1 million Notification delivery options per month and 1000 emails per month

per https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oow19-oracle-free-tier-091619.html

reikuzan · September 2019

gosh, if only i have a cc thankz for sharing anyway.

TheKiller · September 2019

No Debian, no thnx

rm_ · September 2019

creep said: do you use a debit card?

Yes, as far as I can see it has not been charged yet.

In other news:

Subnets they provision in (for your traceroutes):
Japan: 132.145.120.x
India: 140.238.246.x
Korea: 132.145.90.x

Beware: on sign-up it asks you to select your "Home Region". And it turns out that later on you can create the free "Micro" VMs only in that region. Even if you add ("Subscribe" to) other regions in the panel, they will have 0 quota for the Micro "shape", as opposed to 2 for the home one. Maybe it is possible to shift your limits around the regions via support, but I wouldn't necessarily count on that. Post your experience if you try that.

There is support for "Custom image" which accepts a VMDK upload (can create one in VirtualBox). Maybe I will try that later, but there seems to be no VNC console, so will be tricky with regard to adjusting network settings and such.

Or maybe will just convert Ubuntu to Debian.

marrco · September 2019

email delivery services are available ATM only in 2 us regions

farsighter · September 2019

Fully Provisioned. Hooray!

Thanks for info.
At least 150 replies expected of which 70% discussing cards..

jam · September 2019

Self-service sign up for your country is currently unavailable; please contact Oracle Sales to assist you with your request.

mmmm. ok.

dfroe · September 2019

Anybody managed to (easily) install Debian?

There does not seem to be any support for custom ISO, virtual media, iPXE or even KVM console to manually install OS from scratch.

I guess dd'ing a raw disk image over the virtual hard disk won't work due to UEFI and some oracle cloud magic required to properly boot the VM.

Installing Debian via debootstrap from Ubuntu looks a bit reckless and might also brick the bootloader.

Building an image with bootstrap-vz only supports aged Debian jessie.
https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/OracleComputeImage

Any other promising ideas howto get a Debian for free - or success stories?

sanvit · September 2019

@dfroe said:
Anybody managed to (easily) install Debian?

There does not seem to be any support for custom ISO, virtual media, iPXE or even KVM console to manually install OS from scratch.

I guess dd'ing a raw disk image over the virtual hard disk won't work due to UEFI and some oracle cloud magic required to properly boot the VM.

Installing Debian via debootstrap from Ubuntu looks a bit reckless and might also brick the bootloader.

Building an image with bootstrap-vz only supports aged Debian jessie.
https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/OracleComputeImage

Any other promising ideas howto get a Debian for free - or success stories?

Maybe run it inside a docker container...?

Neoon · September 2019

If you all up these resources you get from Google, Amazon.... should be enough to run a summer host for 2-3 months and then make a run.
Sounds like a good concept.

GreenVine · September 2019

I'm now keep getting Out of host capacity error when spinning up an instance in their Seoul region, anyone else?

marrco · September 2019

I guess they offered too much for free.

ITLabs · September 2019

@GreenVine said:
I'm now keep getting Out of host capacity error when spinning up an instance in their Seoul region, anyone else?

LET strikes again, poor Oracle.

tdelenikas · September 2019

Got one in DE, 'apt-get update' skyrocketed STEAL time to 60+... It immediately went to 60 during the update and immediately returned to 0.3 when update finished.

Will check further to see if it's similar to Google's free micro VM.

rm_ · September 2019

dfroe said: Building an image with bootstrap-vz only supports aged Debian jessie.
https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/OracleComputeImage

~~This seems to be the most promising way so far, no problem it's jessie, if this works, can just dist-upgrade it to stretch or buster later within the running VM.~~

Except there's no way to load a tar.gz in their panel. Perhaps the instruction is for an older version of it, or for a different product altogether.

tdelenikas said: Got one in DE, 'apt-get update' skyrocketed STEAL time to 60+... It immediately went to 60 during the update and immediately returned to 0.3 when update finished.

Because you have 1/8th of a CPU core by the plan specs. Yes the CPU usage is capped, my dd+md5 test only gets about 90-100 MB/sec, whereas on a full core of this CPU it would show 500-600 MB/sec or more.

gooliver · September 2019

Will they charge If I accidentally exceed resources allocation (like Google does) or they won't charge for free tier under any circumstances ?

rm_ · September 2019

rm_ said: no problem it's jessie

~~In fact reading the "manifest" file, there's nothing to suggest we can't simply copy this to "stretch.yml" and change jessie to stretch inside it.~~

tetech · September 2019

@gooliver said:
Will they charge If I accidentally exceed resources allocation (like Google does) or they won't charge for free tier under any circumstances ?

When providing the credit card info, it says you will not be charged unless you upgrade your account.

tetech · September 2019

Control panel seems like a nightmare. How do you create an encryption key for a volume? I just get "not authorized" all the time.

dfroe · September 2019

@rm_ said:
Except there's no way to load a tar.gz in their panel. Perhaps the instruction is for an older version of it, or for a different product altogether.

You gave up to early - or didn't read the Oracle Cloud manual.

You need to go to "Object Storage" and create a "Bucket". There you can upload files. When you open the details of an uploaded file, you can retrieve the url of that file. With that url in your clipboard you can create a "Custom Image". The options qcow2 and paravirtualized seem to make the most sense to me. After the Image has been created, you must edit the properties and make this image compatible with Micro instances. If you have come so far, you will be able to deploy a new always free micro instance using your custom image. You will be happy as it might properly boot, you can check from another instance that the assigned private IP responds to ARP, but you won't be able to ping or ssh your new Debian instance, neither via public nor private IP. You will notice that it's the same, no matter if you do it all the way with Debian stretch or jessie and buster will already fail to build.

These are my findings of the day.

I think it was easier to get Debian running on a Amiga than in this weird Oracle Cloud.

raindog308 · September 2019

dfroe said: I think it was easier to get Debian running on a Amiga than in this weird Oracle Cloud.

Oracle isn't interested in people running Debian. Their market is enterprises running big Java stacks, Oracle databases, Weblogic, Peoplesoft, and other grody enterprise apps. Probably 99% of their clients run either RHEL or OEL.

donli · September 2019

@raindog308 said:

dfroe said: I think it was easier to get Debian running on a Amiga than in this weird Oracle Cloud.

Oracle isn't interested in people running Debian. Their market is enterprises running big Java stacks, Oracle databases, Weblogic, Peoplesoft, and other grody enterprise apps. Probably 99% of their clients run either RHEL or OEL.

Just be happy you're not limited to running Solaris.

mountainpup · September 2019

I don't know about u oracle linux 7.7 distro is ok by me im up and running no complaints heck man its free, fsa all around

hacktek · September 2019

Slow AF. Time to wait for everyone to start idling these boxes but the performance currently (cpu, disk, network) is very bad.

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