[SadTrombone]

I'm personally using it because they give you multiple VMs for free. 2x x86 VMs with 1GB of RAM, and 4 ARM (Ampere) VMs with 4 cores + 24GB to split up 4 ways as you see fit. All of that with a combined 200gb of block storage + 10tb of data transfer.

I'm no fan of Oracle, but that's a good amount of free stuff for my hobby projects.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

Unfortunately these can disappear without warning. With AWS this basically never happens.

[mbajkowski]

Can you elaborate on this? These are not preemptible, why would they disappear without warning? I've been running on these for 2 or 3 years without any issues thus far.

[BackBlast]

When your account changes from the time based free tier to the only forever free tier they often shut things down. Even if you're careful not to use the time based free tier stuff, which I was, it went pop anyway.

If you're below their "idle system" threshold, they'll shut it down.

Get past the 3 month or whatever it is tier. Put a low level load on the system to get it above the idle threshold and you should be good to have a nice personal playground. Probably.

I've had systems go down to both these. They also have rejected every credit card I tried to throw at them. Which is a known problem for them as well as some other cloud providers. I no longer put anything critical on OCI.

[devrand]

They might be referring to their idle reclamation policy: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

[mbajkowski]

Thanks, very useful, I was not aware of this. There really should be a warning before this happens. I really need test my incremental backups now.

[andrewinardeer]

I can confirm I was given an email about 4 weeks out before they reclaimed my idle VMs.