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Oracle has offered attractive Always Free Tier to their cloud service since 2019. However, only recently I am able to play with it. I tried to sign up before but my credit card was denied. This problem has somehow cleared now and I am able to create (free) account with Oracle Cloud.

The most attractive offering is the ARM-based Ampere A1 Compute instance. You can use total 4 cores and 24 GB RAM, in maximum 4 virtual machines (VMs), For example you can allocate 2 cores and 12 GB RAM in 2 VMs each, or just use all of them in a big single VM. If you insist on x86 processors, you can create AMD-based instances. But for only VMs with 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM are free, and you are limited to 2 VMs.

I was curious about this ARM-based compute, so I decided to try it. I provision a VM with 2 cores and 8 GB RAM and 80 GB storage, running Ubuntu 22.04. I was struggling even creating this at first though.

Oracle cloud service interface is especially more complex, offering too much (for me) unnecessary features. They are probably good for corporate customers, but not for me who just want to play with Linux servers and apps on the cloud. I also met “out of host capacity” errors before I managed to create a compute instance. Apparently this is not unusual, and the only way to solve it just to try again. From the Oracle FAQ:

An “out of host capacity” error indicates a temporary lack of Always Free shapes in your home region. Oracle is working to provide more capacity, though it might take several days before additional capacity is available in your home region. If your home region has multiple availability domains, try creating the instance in a different availability domain. If that doesn’t work, wait a while, and then try to launch the instance again.

I was thinking of playing with federated social media software, but end up with installing NextCloud. I stumbled on another problem here. The installation need the ports 80 and 443 open. Oracle, by default, only open port 22 (ssh). It’s a good practice security-wise. However I thought it was set in the operating system. It turned out the firewall was managed from the Oracle cloud service interface (not controlled by the OS). I had to create new ingress rules to open port 80 and 443, and then configure the OS to open the ports.

I found the network was rather slow when I downloaded the tarball from Nextcloud.com. However when NextCloud has been installed and running, the network performance is quite satisfactory. I use it to upload some photos and then sync my laptop’s Document folder.

This is not my first experience with NextCloud. I used to run an installation on DigitalOcean, but cease to operate the server because the cost got too expensive. Let’s see how long it can last this time.