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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Notes on Oracle Cloud Free Tier (via «I got the “free forever” 4 core/24GB ARM VM from Oracle Cloud. What should I do with it?»)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/02

Some notes (mainly links) on the Oracle Cloud Free Tier as at the time of writing it is the only provider with a “free forever” tier.

In the past for FOSS, there was [Wayback/Archive] Fosshost on Twitter: “@d_feldman Check out fosshost.org for an alternative to Oracle Cloud for ARM/AArch64. We are free, open source and you will never get bill shock. Open source projects must apply only.”, but at the end of 2022 they started to wind down their services as per [Wayback/Archive] Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services

Fosshost to Sunset Tenant Services

At this time, Fosshost is deeply sorry to announce we are no longer able to continue offering our services.

Because of this, we strongly recommend all Fosshost tenants to backup their data immediately, and migrate elsewhere as soon as possible.

Oh before you begin: if you need a reverse DNS record then be sure to request that as soon as your free tier starts: at that time you have USD 300 credits for running paid services which includes the support to request reverse DNS records.

Anyway, many links on the Oracle OCI Cloud Free Tier (especially the ARM deal is great: lots of RAM as compared to the x86 VMs):

  • Reverse DNS:
    • [Wayback/Archive] Setting Up Reverse DNS Zones

      …

       Note

      You can only create reverse DNS zones for IP ranges that you control. Contact support to request a reverse DNS (PTR) record for an IP address owned by Oracle. For example, a public IP address that was automatically assigned to your compute instance or load balancer. For more information, see Reverse DNS (PTR).

      …

    • [Wayback/Archive] How to configure Reverse DNS for mail server configurations? – Oracle Forums

      If you are using a compute instance on OCI and you want (or need) to have a reverse DNS setup for your compute instance you need only follow the instructions here. Note: this is only available for paid accounts; it is not available for customers on a free tier or trial account.

    • [Wayback/Archive] DNS in Your Virtual Cloud Network: Reverse DNS (PTR)

      A reverse DNS record, also known as a pointer record (PTR), resolves an IP address back to a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). It functions in the opposite way of an A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) forward record. For example: 192.0.2.5 → myhost.mydomain.com.

      You can request that a PTR record be established for your cloud IP addresses:

      1. Create an A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) forward record that points the fully qualified domain name to the IP prior to opening the request. You can create the record using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS service, or a third-party DNS provider.
      2. Open a service request and include the following information:
        1. The IP address and fully qualified domain name (FQDN) you want in the PTR.
        2. The FQDN of the forward record that you created in step 1.

      After the service request is received, the forward (A or AAAA) record information is validated to be sure it can be successfully resolved, and Oracle creates the PTR record on your behalf.

    • [Wayback/Archive] What is the cost of adding a reverse DNS record? : oraclecloud (thanks [Wayback/Archive] miraunpajaro, [Wayback/Archive] perdidaum, [Wayback/Archive] theseusernames and [Wayback/Archive] EduRJBR):

      ..

      It’s free but you need to able to open a service request(pay as you go account or free trial account. Free tier account(expired trial) will not work). Then open a request about creating a PTR record for your IP..

      …

      I see, so to be on the safe side. As long as I keep using the always free machines, upgrading to pay as you go will not cost me extra, am I correct?

      …

      yes, just be careful of the settings you touch and everything will remain free.

      …

      even if port 25 is closed it’s possible to use port 587 to connect

      …

      Doesn’t cost anything, you have to open a service request, and it can be done using a free account unless something changed. But I was still on the free trial period when I did it, don’t know if it can make any difference.

      …

  • [Wayback/Archive] Leichte Panzerfaust on Twitter: “@jpluimers @gitlab Use one of the cloud service providers free tiers (e.g. oracle) host your own server”
  • Oracle Cloud – Wikipedia / Oracle Cloud Platform – Wikipedia (I think both lemmas should be merged into one)
  • [Wayback/Archive] Oracle Cloud, Free (Almost) Forever. – DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻
  • Sign-in/register: [Wayback/Archive] cloud.oracle.com
  • [Wayback/Archive] Cloud Free Tier | Oracle (a.k.a. Always Free)
  • [Wayback/Archive] Cloud Free Tier | Oracle (or localised pages like [Wayback/Archive] Cloud Free Tier | Oracle Nederland):

    Always Free cloud services*

    Services you can use for an unlimited time.

    • Two Oracle Autonomous Databases with powerful tools like Oracle APEX and Oracle SQL Developer
    • Two AMD Compute VMs
    • Up to 4 instances of ARM Ampere A1 Compute with 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month
    • Block, Object, and Archive Storage; Load Balancer and data egress; Monitoring and Notifications

    …

    What are Always Free cloud services?

    Infrastructure

    • 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU** and 1 GB memory each
    • Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as 1 VM or up to 4 VMs with 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month
    • 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total
    • 10 GB Object Storage – Standard
    • 10 GB Object Storage – Infrequent Access
    • 10 GB Archive Storage
    • Resource Manager: managed Terraform
    • 5 OCI Bastions

    Databases

    • Your choice of Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous JSON Database, or APEX Application Development. Two databases total, each with 1 OCPU** and 20 GB storage.
    • NoSQL Database with 133 million reads per month, 133 million writes per month, 25 GB storage per table, up to 3 tables.

    Observability and Management

    • Monitoring: 500 million ingestion datapoints, 1 billion retrieval datapoints
    • Application Performance Monitoring: 1000 tracing events per hour
    • Logging: 10 GB per month
    • Notifications: 1 million sent through https per month, 1000 sent through email per month
    • Service Connector Hub: 2 service connectors

    Additional services

      • Flexible Load Balancer: 1 instance, 10 Mbps
      • Flexible Network Load Balancer
      • Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month
      • Virtual Cloud Networks (VCN): Maximum of 2 VCNs, includes IPv4 and IPv6 support
      • VCN Flow Logs: Up to 10 GB per month shared across OCI Logging services
      • Site-to-Site VPN: 50 IPSec connections
      • Content Management Starter Edition: 5000 assets per month
      • Certificates: 5 Private CA and 150 private TLS certificates
      • Email Delivery: 100 emails sent per day

    …

    * Free Tier is available worldwide. See the data regions page for detailed service availability.
    ** 1 OCPU on x86 CPU Architecture (AMD and Intel) = 2 vCPUs; 1 OCPU on Arm CPU Architecture (Ampere) = 1 vCPU
  • [Wayback/Archive] Cloud Data Center Regions and Locations | Oracle
  • [Wayback/Archive] Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Free Tier
    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Free Tier includes a free time-limited promotional trial that allows you to explore a wide range of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure products, and a set of Always Free offers that never expire.
    The Free Tier and Always Free resources are not available in US Government Cloud regions.
    • [Wayback/Archive] Quickly Launch Your Always Free Resources Using Resource Manager

      Oracle offers you the ability to automatically create a full set of Always Free resources in a few minutes using the Resource Manager service’s templates feature. Templates are pre-built Terraform configurations that help you easily create sets of resources used in common scenarios using a single, simple workflow. When you provision your Always Free resources using the provided template, your resources are created with the settings and configuration you need to start creating applications in the cloud. You don’t need to have experience with Terraform to use the template.

    • [Wayback/Archive] Frequently Asked Questions: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Free Tier

      See OCI Free Tier Frequently Asked Questions for answers to common questions.

    • [Wayback/Archive] Always Free Resources is a really important page as it has a truckload of information, so here is just the tip of the veil:

      Available Shapes

      • Micro instances (AMD processor): All tenancies get up to two Always Free VM instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape, which has an AMD processor.
      • Ampere A1 Compute instances (Arm processor): All tenancies get the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape, which has an Arm processor. For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory.

      In regions with multiple availability domains:

      • You can create Ampere A1 Compute instances in any availability domain.
      • Instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape can only be created in one availability domain.

      …

      Depending on the size of the boot volume and the number of OCPUs that you allocate to each Ampere A1 Compute instance, you can create up to four compute instances. The minimum boot volume size for each instance is 47 GB, regardless of shape. Your account comes with 200 GB of Always Free block volume storage which you use to create the boot volumes for your compute instances.

      …

      You do not have to assign a public IPv4 address to every compute instance in your tenancy. You can create a compute instance in a public subnet without assigning the instance a public IP addresses, and create an instance in a private subnet.

      …

      For paid or free trial accounts that are eligible for Always Free resources, the same 200 GB of Always Free volume resources and five Always Free volume backup resources are available. When one of your Always Free resources is deleted, some of your Always Free resource capacity becomes available. When you have available Always Free capacity, Block Volume automatically tries to transition an existing paid resource to an Always Free resource. For example, if you have four 50 GB Always Free volumes and one 50 GB paid volume, and you delete one of the Always Free volumes, the service converts the paid volume to an Always Free volume.

      …

      All master encryption keys protected by software are free. All tenancies get 20 key versions of master encryption keys protected by a hardware security module (HSM) and 150 Always Free Vault secrets. You can spread these keys or secrets across any number of vaults in the tenancy, although virtual private vaults are not included in the Always Free resources.

      …

      All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancies created December 15, 2020 or later get one Always Free Flexible Load Balancer with a minimum and maximum bandwidth set to 10 Mbps.

      …

      Free Tier tenancies (tenancies that are not paid and do not have Free Trial credits) can have up to 2 virtual cloud networks (VCNs). A VCN is a software-defined network that you set up in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data centers in a particular region. VCNs include IPv4 and IPv6 support.

      …

      Site-to-Site VPN provides a site-to-site IPSec connection between your on-premises network and your virtual cloud network (VCN). Use up to 50 IPSec connections with your Free Tier account. Learn more.

      …

      As part of your Always Free resources, you can send

      • 1 million https notifications per month, and 1000 email notifications per month. Learn more about OCI‘s Notifications service.
      • 3100 emails for free per month. Learn more about OCI‘s Email Delivery service.

      …

      All tenancies get 2 Always Free service connectors . Service Connector Hub helps cloud engineers manage and move data between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services and from OCI to third-party services.

      …

      As part of your Always Free resources, you get 10 TB per month of outbound data.

      …

      OCI‘s Bastion service provides restricted and time-limited Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) access to target resources that don’t have public endpoints. Bastion is free for both free and paid accounts. See Bastion for more information.

      …

      You can find your tenancy’s limits for Always Free resources in the Console. To check these limits: Open the navigation menu and click Governance & Administration. Under Tenancy Management, click Limits, Quotas and Usage.

      …

  • [Wayback/Archive] Arm-Based Compute (emphasis mine, I could not find an entry on AMD/Intel based compute):

    Ampere A1 Compute is a general-purpose, Arm-based compute platform based on the Ampere Altra processor. Ampere A1 Compute instances provide superior price-performance, near linear scaling, built-in security due to the single-threaded core architecture, and a broad developer ecosystem.

  • [Wayback/Archive] Platform Images

    An image is a template of a virtual hard drive. The image determines the operating system and other software for an instance. The following table lists the platform images that are available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For specific image and kernel version details, along with changes between versions, see the Image Release Notes.

    …

    • Oracle Autonomous Linux 7 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6
    • Oracle Linux 9 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7,
      Oracle Linux 8 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6,
      Oracle Linux 7 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6,
      Oracle Linux 6 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 4
    • Oracle Linux Cloud Developer 8 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6
    • CentOS Stream 8
    • CentOS 7
    • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS,
      Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
    • Windows Server 2022,
      Windows Server 2019,
      Windows Server 2016,
      Windows Server 2012 R2

    …

    All platform images include rules that allow only “root” on Linux instances or “Administrators” on Windows Server instances to make outgoing connections to the iSCSI network endpoints (169.254.0.2:3260, 169.254.2.0/24:3260) that serve the instance’s boot and block volumes.

    …

    Platform images give you the ability to run custom scripts or supply custom metadata when the instance launches. To do this, you specify a custom user data script in the Initialization script field when you create the instance. For more information about startup scripts, see cloud-init for Linux-based images and cloudbase-init for Windows-based images.

    …

    Oracle Linux and CentOS images are preconfigured to let you install and update packages from the repositories on the Oracle public yum server. The repository configuration file is in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory on your instance. You can install, update, and remove packages by using the yum utility.

    On Oracle Autonomous Linux images, Oracle Ksplice is installed and configured by default to run automatic updates.

    …

    The Ubuntu image is preconfigured with suitable repositories to allow you to install, update, and remove packages.

    …

    For instances created using Oracle Linux and CentOS images, the username opc is created automatically. The opc user has sudo privileges and is configured for remote access over the SSH v2 protocol using RSA keys. The SSH public keys that you specify while creating instances are added to the /home/opc/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

    For instances created using the Ubuntu image, the username ubuntu is created automatically. The ubuntu user has sudo privileges and is configured for remote access over the SSH v2 protocol using RSA keys. The SSH public keys that you specify while creating instances are added to the /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

    Note that root login is disabled.

    …

    Be aware of these end-of-support dates:

    • CentOS 6: Support ended on November 30, 2020.
    • CentOS 8: Support ended on December 31, 2021.
    • Ubuntu 14.04: Support ended on April 19, 2019.
    • Ubuntu 16.04: Support ended in April 2021.
    • Windows Server 2008 R2: Support ended on January 14, 2020.

    …

  • [Wayback/Archive] Managing Custom Images
  • [Wayback/Archive] Compute Shapes

    A shape is a template that determines the number of OCPUs , amount of memory, and other resources that are allocated to an instance. Compute shapes are available with AMD processors, Intel processors, and Arm-based processors.

  • [Wayback/Archive] Cloud Price List | Oracle (really important when you switch away from the free to the paid tier!)
  • [Wayback/Archive] Tutorial – Launching Your First Linux Instance
  • [Wayback/Archive] Site-to-Site VPN
  • [Wayback/Archive] Cloud Regions and Data Centers | Oracle
  • [Wayback/Archive] Configuring the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure NTP Service for an Instance
  • [Wayback/Archive] Service Limits: Other Compute Resources
    Resource
    		 Limit Name
    Scope
    Monthly or Annual Universal Credits
    Pay-as-You-Go or Promo
    Autoscaling configurations config-count Region 200 200
    Custom images custom-image-count Region 100 25
    Cluster networks cluster-network-count Tenancy 15 Contact Us
    Instance configurations config-count Region 200 200
    Instance pools pool-count Region 50 50
    Instances per instance pool Region 500 500
  • [Wayback/Archive] Service Limits: Requesting a Service Limit Increase

There are truckloads of services you could run on these VMs, though you have to be aware that some might have limited or no support for ARM (that support is rapidly increasing though). Great inspiration can be found on:

Services that come to my mind:

  • SMTP primary/secondary (postfix)
  • DNS primary/secondary (probably not named any more)
  • bitwarden
  • storage
  • scheduled tasks

Note: at the time of writing the ARM based VMs are available in a lot more locations than just the USA mentioned in the Tweets below. Likely when you read this they are available in all regions.

Others blogged/discussed/reported on this as well:

All because of this thread by [Wayback/Archive] Daniel Feldman (@d_feldman) / Twitter:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] I got the “free forever” 4 core/24GB ARM VM from Oracle Cloud. What should I do with it?
  2. [Wayback/Archive] A quick benchmark: It took 35m 43s to build the kernel (ARM with all default modules) Compare to 10m 8s on my home desktop (12 core AMD), and 59m 44s on my Raspberry Pi 4 :)
  3. [Wayback/Archive] I started exactly the same test running on an AWS a1.medium instance (their cheapest ARM node)…. it is still running after well over an hour I have to go to bed 🤣 We’ll find out in the morning
  4. [Wayback/Archive] My shell timed out in the middle of the night, so I had to run it again * drumroll * On the a1.medium instance, the same test took *360m 8s* I mean, I knew IO was slow on these tiny instances, but SIX TIMES SLOWER THAN A $25 RASPBERRY PI…
  5. [Wayback/Archive] Now I want to do some more cloud benchmarking :)
  6. [Wayback/Archive] Also very glad I didn’t stay up and wait for it to finish 🤣

With some responses:

On Fosshost: [Wayback/Archive] Statement from Fosshost’s Founder 20221208:

…

Fosshost will withdraw from offering hosting services directly to the free software community.

…

Can openSUSE run on the Oracle Free Tier?

I don’t know yet, so here are some links that might help me with it:

  • [Wayback/Archive] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 (BYOS) – SUSE – Oracle Cloud Marketplace
  • [Wayback/Archive] Bring Your Own Image (BYOI)
    The Bring Your Own Image (BYOI) feature enables you to bring your own versions of operating systems to the cloud as long as the underlying hardware supports it. The services do not depend on the OS you run.
    The BYOI feature does the following things:
    • Enables virtual machine cloud migration projects.
    • Supports both old and new operating systems.
    • Encourages experimentation.
    • Increases infrastructure flexibility.

    …

    The Linux and UNIX-like operating systems in the following table support custom image import.

    …

    Linux and UNIX-like Operating Systems Supported Versions
    CentOS 4.0, 4.8, 5.11, 6.9, 7, Stream 8 or later
    Debian 5.0.10, 6.0, 7, 8 or later
    Flatcar Container Linux 2345.3.0 or later
    FreeBSD 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 or later
    openSUSE Leap 15.1
    Oracle Linux 5.11, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x
    RHEL 4.5, 5.5, 5.6, 5.9, 5.11, 6.5, 6.9, 7 or later
    SUSE 11, 12.1, 12.2 or later
    Ubuntu 12.04, 13.04 or later

    …

    Be aware of the following information:
    • Licensing requirements: You must comply with all licensing requirements when you upload and start instances based on OS images that you supply.
    • The maximum image size is 400 GB.
    • Service limits and compartment quotas apply to custom images. For more information, see Service Limits. You can request a service limit increase.

    …

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers a fully managed, secure, and highly available NTP service that you can use to set the date and time of your compute and Database instances from within your virtual cloud network (VCN). We recommend that you configure your instances to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure NTP service.

  • [Wayback/Archive] Importing Custom Linux Images

    The Compute service lets you import Linux-based images that were created outside of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For example, you can import images running on your on-premises physical or virtual machines (VMs), or VMs running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic. You can then launch your imported images on compute virtual machines.

    …

    The Linux and UNIX-like operating systems in the following table support custom image import.

    …

    Linux and UNIX-like Operating Systems Supported Versions
    CentOS 4.0, 4.8, 5.11, 6.9, 7, Stream 8 or later
    Debian 5.0.10, 6.0, 7, 8 or later
    Flatcar Container Linux 2345.3.0 or later
    FreeBSD 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 or later
    openSUSE Leap 15.1
    Oracle Linux 5.11, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x
    RHEL 4.5, 5.5, 5.6, 5.9, 5.11, 6.5, 6.9, 7 or later
    SUSE 11, 12.1, 12.2 or later
    Ubuntu 12.04, 13.04 or later
  • [Wayback/Archive] openSUSE Software package oci-cli

    oci-cli: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure CLI

    The CLI is a small footprint tool that you can use on its own or with the Console to complete Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tasks. The CLI provides the same core functionality as the Console, plus additional commands. Some of these, such as the ability to run scripts, extend the Console’s functionality.

    There is no official package available for openSUSE Leap 15.4

  • [Wayback/Archive] Install oracle-cloud-agent on openSUSE using the Snap Store | Snapcraft

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (oci.osi) • Server and Cloud

    Oracle Cloud Infrastructure agent for compute instance management and monitoring.

Queries

–jeroen

This entry was posted on 2025/10/02 at 12:00 and is filed under CentOS, openSuSE, OracleLinux, RedHat, SuSE Linux, Ubuntu, Uncategorized, Windows, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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