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free-tier

Oracle Free Tier references & resources

John Switzerland

• 1 min read
Oracle Free Tier references & resources
Photo by gokhan polat on Unsplash

Links to handy references. Oracle's documentation is generally excellent, worth looking before asking.

General

/r/oraclecloud is a great place to search for answers and ask questions, plenty of helpful souls around.

Oracle

  1. Free Tier docs top level
    • Always Free Resources section (including specifics of what counts as "free tier")
    • Unused instances can be reclaimed by Oracle, and what defines "unused"
    • Incoming bandwidth is free, and a very generous 10 TB outbound data a month. You can track it via Billing & Cost Management --> Cost Analysis (Show: Usage, Filter --> Service, Network)
  2. OCI Free Tier Frequently Asked Questions
    • Accepted payment methods in particular state "We accept credit cards and debit cards that function like credit cards. We do not accept debit cards with a PIN, virtual cards, or prepaid cards."
  3. If you go paid (PAYG highly recommended for free tier users), the Oracle Cost Estimator is excellent
    • You can also easily set up a cost alert, for both actual and projected spend, for extra peace of mind.
  4. After switching to PAYG, enabling 2FA / MFA on your logins - especially those with OCI admin access - is crucial. You don't want anyone creating instances and costing you money, or getting access to existing instances. See the well written IAM MFA (Identity & Access Management - Multi-Factor Authentication) guide
    • u/threehappypenguins recently shared the process they followed here:
    • Sign into the console
    • Menu > Identity & Security > Users
    • Federation > OracleIdentityCloudService
    • find the link to "Oracle Identity Cloud Service Console" in the Identity Provider Information section
    • Security section / menu item
    • followed steps 7-10 from here (a few things are different, but it's generally the same).
    • Sign in again and you should be prompted to setup MFA.
  5. Cloud Customer Connect community
  6. TOS / Terms of Service - what not to do with your free resources if you want to avoid your instances / account being terminated:
    7. TOS document
    8. Good discussion / breakdown of the above
  7. OCI status page