Just posting it here as well (have done so before), but beware the Oracle Cloud one. I've had tons of issues getting my account deleted, it's been more than a year and I'm still having to raise tickets and go back and forth.
The resources are nice and they can easily run a small page or be useful to try out hosting things, deploying apps and general server maintenance/deployment/etc. However, anything you will be running on them shouldn't be essential to you. For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi.
The entire platform is also unnecessarily convoluted, but I'd argue that's the case with most of these cloud providers - felt the same way trying AWS for a project and I feel the same way every day using Azure. However, out of these offerings, Oracle's is the most generous free one, just keep in mind it's just that - free. So you do get what you pay for.
It’s a bit convoluted with the VM getting disabled a month in (and very annoying), but the fix is pretty easy. You can delete the old VM (keeping the boot disk), and recreate it with the original boot disk. New public IP address will be assigned, but after that you won’t have issues. I’ve been running my instance for almost a solid year without issues since the month trial ended.
I agree it can be fixed, it was more of a cautionary tale - you go ahead and set something up and 30 days down the line it's not responding. Depending on what you might've played with, you now have to start from scratch. I was using it to do a setup from scratch for a Wireguard VPN and being still early on I was going through things one at a time so didn't have any scripts setup to run the whole setup on a new machine. I had lost quite a bit of work - again; early days.
> For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi.
I tried this, and it will worked, so I'm not really sure.
I recreated the VM anyway just to be safe.
You can recreate it, it's just the original VM you setup gets disabled, so it's about any services you had running on that particular VM. Sorry, I wasn't clear in my explanation.
Honestly nothing compares to Oracle cloud free tier.
Its amazing, you have a better VPS than 15$ per month can get you on any VPS host, even if its ARM, its worth it.
As for CI/CD, I didn't know GiLlab gives you 50,000 minutes for public projects, the issue with gitlab is the recent limits make it really complex for an open source project to grow on GitLab,
Yes I know there is the Gitlab Open source program, but its an unnecessary complications that doesn't exist on GitHub.
Even non-free tier burstable VM is super cheap. For example, a VM.Standard.E4.Flex (AMD x86) with 1 OCPU (2 vCPU) and 4GB RAM with burstable baseline 50% is just ~$13.05/month (($0.025*50% + 4*$0.0015)*730hr). With baseline 12.5% it is just ~$6.66/month.
In comparison, AWS t3a.medium (2vCPU, 4GB RAM, burstable baseline 20%) will cost ~$27.45/month ($0.0376*730hr). DigitalOcean's 2vCPU 4GB Droplet will cost $24/month.
Hetzner deserves way more attention in the VPS space. They offer an equivalent configuration for just €5.32/month, and I'm not even rounding anything down.
And for about the same price that AWS offers for their weak boxes ("~$27.45/mo"), Hetzner will give you 8 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM... Yes, the IPv4 cost is excluded, but it's only €0.61/month if you even want to have it.
I've been using the free tier for two years and am yet to run into anything shady. Saved me countless bucks in the meantime (before arguing that it's like two seconds of work for you, remember that other countries do exist, and even something like DigitalOcean is pretty costly for many of us). Unlike many other free tiers you are not able to create any paid resources unless you opt in into the paid tier.
Oracle is not the kind of company you want to test with things like that.
Trust me, I've worked with Oracle. They'll assign sales assistants and lawyers to you. They'll chase you down for pennies. Doesn't matter if you actually owe the money, they'll get it.
They spent fourteen months chasing up me and my project manager for $220 that we didn't owe them. They just decided that we should pay it and they'll work out if we actually owe them anything afterwards. The credit card had expired years ago and we hadn't used their products at all since 2016. Doesn't matter, they still spent a year assigning more and more of their team.
Eventually we just paid because it was cheaper than letting them take our company to court. The time taken from me, my line manager, and the project manager answering calls/emails/letters probably added up to a lot lot more than $220.
I've used the Oracle Free tier for a while as well, and it's been pretty good.
If I have a complaint, it's the really, really, really complicated management console. It's like they looked at AWS and said, "okay, like this, but somehow worse." I mean, it all makes sense, but you can smell the bad coffee and free donuts from all of the meetings with 192 separate corporate divisions on the invite list.
It took me a while to discover the free Public IP. I ran something on the free tier for most of a year, and at some point they did some kind of internal work, and my IP address changed for the first time. I didn't care before because it stayed up and unchanged for so long.
I have to say, it put Oracle on the map as a definite option for me. Even with the Bizarro World management console.
I agree. I have been using Oracle cloud for free for about a year now for a side project that is used in production with paying customers. I had my reservations at first, but figured it was worth a shot to save me the $15/month I was paying Digital Ocean. So far so good.
FWIW, I have a close family member who works for Oracle and they claim that they're sincerely trying to be developer/start-up friendly in hopes to gain traction in the cloud space. I get that the default is to assume there is always a hidden agenda with Oracle, but it is possible they're trying to show some good faith here.
There's no contradiction there. Of course they want to be developer+startup friendly in order to get traction in the cloud space. How else would they get more people to extort in the future?
I'm less concerned that they're operating in good faith than that there are multiple competing interests within Oracle. Once (if?) their cloud offering gains traction, someone somewhere else in the org will decide that the free tier is costing them too much, and the screws start getting tightened.
They aren't unique among big companies to have offered utterly opaque and punitive pricing terms, but if they hope to use the free tier to attract developers into recommending Oracle to their employers, I have a hard time imagining it will be successful given what a terrible experience older folk have had with them.
Perhaps someday, people will forget the lawnmower analogy (and the reasons behind it) and they can start fresh, I guess.
Our developer experience platform, Coherence, just opened up a free beta for Google Cloud Platform (AWS coming soon) at withcoherence.com. We will always offer a free plan…
It’s a great way to get the most out of a cloud’s free tier - we help you deploy a production-quality app onto the cloud infrastructure in your own cloud account. And we add integrated cloud IDE, cloud shell, and a dashboard on top of it. Feedback welcome!
One thing I noticed after my initial experiments with serverless is that it is very hard to do basic development and testing locally (i.e. without potentially running the risk of a big bill). I would have thought there would be mocks of all major services that would permit you to do straightforward local development and testing.
Algolia is a really nice platform, but they definitely nickel and dime you with the free tier. It says 10K free search "operations" which includes every type-ahead or any other API request. We hit our monthly limit with just bot traffic in 2 weeks.
This is a very useful resource! Thanks to the author :)
I was looking exactly something like this as a DevOps Engineer who wants to play around during the spare time to sharpen my own skills but avoid using any company resources!
The resources are nice and they can easily run a small page or be useful to try out hosting things, deploying apps and general server maintenance/deployment/etc. However, anything you will be running on them shouldn't be essential to you. For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi.
The entire platform is also unnecessarily convoluted, but I'd argue that's the case with most of these cloud providers - felt the same way trying AWS for a project and I feel the same way every day using Azure. However, out of these offerings, Oracle's is the most generous free one, just keep in mind it's just that - free. So you do get what you pay for.