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by lambda 2944 days ago
Oh, yeah, looks like you also have to add the CPU, that's not included in the base price.

Although, for RAM and storage you can purchase that separately at cheaper prices.

I just tried to sign up for IBM's cloud, to see if I could use the limited free trial or $200 credit to try out one of the bare-metal systems.

Nope. The limited free trial only seems to apply to a few of their SaaS offerings; and the $200 credit also doesn't apply to their "infrastructure services" like VMs, bare metals servers, storage, etc.

Additionally, it looks like you need to get manual approval for you account to be able to use the VMs; even once I added my credit card info, they tell me my account needs to be reviewed by someone before I can actually rent server time.

On AWS or GCS, you just sign up and spin up VMs. I've used that many times for quick compat testing against different operating systems, some quick extra CPU cycles, deploying test servers, and so on.

But on IBM's cloud, you need someone to actually manually approve your account before you can do anything but use their SaaS offerings.

They really don't seem to want to attract people casually trying things out.

edit: after a bit, they did approve my account for infrastructure access. But the bare-metal POWER servers can't be rented by the hour, only by the month, and they start at $1000 per month. Still not really helpful for casual exploration. They also have such wonderful usability features as requiring you to allow popups in order to configure and order servers or VMs.