The Oracle Cloud Free Tier
The New “Always Free Service”s announced at OOW19
Every software vendor has also some free offers, to attract users, demonstrate their product, and support advocacy. What is free at Oracle? Today, the target is about the products which help to attract developers. We have the Oracle XE database that can be installed everywhere for free, with some limits on the capacity, but mostly every features. There are the developer tools that ease the use of the database, like SQL Developer.
But what about Cloud?
Cloud free trials and promotions
You may have tested the 30-days free trial, and find it not so easy as it is for only one month, with an e-mail address, phone number, and credit card information that you cannot reuse. The limit on credit is not a problem as they are burned slowlier than in paid subscription (good to test many features, not good to evaluate the real price). As an ACE Director, I have access to longer trials. Actually, those trials are just promotions: you subscribe like for a paid account but are not be charged.
As far as I know, there are 5 types of promotions.
- “Free Trial” : $300 / 30 days
- “Developer” : $500 / 30 days
- “Student” : $5000 / 365 days
- “Startup” : $100000 / 365 days
- “Educator” : $25000 / 365 days
Where did I get this information from? It is just a guess when looking at the trial sign-up form source code which contains a JavaScript “promoMap”
Where did I get to this sign-up page? I just clicked on “Start for free” in the new Oracle Cloud Free Tier that was just announced by Larry Elison at Oracle Open World 2019. And that’s the purpose of this blog post.
The 30-days “Free Trial” is the one available from the Oracle website (the annoying pop-up that you get even when reading Oracle blogs). The “Developer” one can be available for Hands-On Labs. The “Student” is for Oracle University customers, the “Educator” is for the Oracle University instructors. The “Student” is also the one we can get through the ACED program. The “Startup” one has higher limits (like 20 OCPU instead of 6 in the other promotions)
Oracle Cloud Free Tier
Here it is, an extension of the current free trial (300$ on mostly all services, up to 8 instances and 5TB, for 30 days) where, in addition to this free trial, some services are offered free for un unlimited time.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
It is an extension. You still need to create a trial account (with a new e-mail, phone number, credit card) but beyond the trial you will continue to have access to some free service, forever.
What is free?
The unlimited free tier lets you create at most 2 database services and 2 compute services.
2 database services
Those are the common autonomous services: ATP serverless (for OLTP) and ADW (for datawarehouse). They come with many tools for administration, development and reporting: APEX (low code rapid application development), SQL Developer (Web version), Zepplin notebooks (through Oracle Machine Learning),…
Each database service is limited to 1 OCPU and can go up to 20 GB.
2 compute services
Each VM is limited to 1/8th of OCPU and 1 GB RAM.
It includes the Block storage (100GB) for 2 volumes (to be associated to the 2 VMs), Object Storage (10GB), Archive storage (10GB), and one load balancer (10 Mbps).
How free and unlimited?
First, you must sign-up for the 30-days trial, where you have to provide credit card information.
But you will not be billed.
What you do with the 30-days trial can be upgraded later to a paid subscription. Or not, and you still keep the free tier.
You need to provide a unique e-mail, phone, and credit card. You need to access the free service at least every 3 months or it can be removed. Note that nothing prevents you to run production on it (except the limits of course).
More info on the “Always Free Cloud Services” in the Universal Credits document:
Here is what I get after the subscription:
Update 19-OCT-2019 — Public IP Address: Unavailable
When you create a compute instance, it can happen that the network selected by default is not one that allows public internet access, like this:
Then you need to “Show Shape, Network and Storage Options” and select the Virtual Cloud Network with a Public Subnet, and then “Assign a public IP address”:
