I had the opportunity to explore Oracle's always free tier plan and here are my thoughts around it.
What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
It is Oracle's version of Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud Services Platform, and others. I think you get the idea. You can start an instance of whatever you would like to build and take it from there. I learned about them from a tweet chain about cloud platforms folks were using and folks recommendations. So this morning I decided to give it a spin and see what their always free tier looks like.
What I love about it
- 4 Ampere ARM-based flexible OCPUs
- up to 24GB RAM
- 200GB block volume
- Load balancers
- and much more!
And then the experience. Sigh.
First things first, I found their web interface to be sluggish at times. For instance, when I first created my account and was waiting for the instance to be set up it was just hung up on a cloud animation. After waiting for what felt like 10 minutes I had to refresh the page to figure out hey is it good to go? It was. The whole experience to me feels like the last time I had messed with an Oracle product, which was probably 2005. Dated, clunky, and how we did things back then.
I was then given an option to choose the home region, this is where your resources would be allocated. I chose US West San Jose. So far not so great but hey 24GB RAM, lets power through. Go through the sheet of creating my first VM instance using a Canonical Ubuntu image with 1 OCPU, and 6GB RAM.
And this is where you go yay lets launch but hey we are in 2005 remember. You perhaps instead will get greeted with an "Out of host capacity" error. Yes, an error that then continues to ask you to wait, try again later, change your fault domain, or see if the sun is positioned on the X-axis of Mars. Okay, that last part was me.
Their error messages are the equivalent to the Windows 95 blue screens, you remember the ones that even Microsoft would have trouble deciphering of what exactly is the issue because it could be 'anything.'
At this point I figured hey no problem, no capacity in San Jose lets move over to Phoenix! Oh but wait, you can't change your home region. After you have subscribed to one you are locked in folks. That's that. There is no option to change. Actually, that was chat supports one-line response, "you can't change home region." Grrr. It's like they may have to carry those servers over to Phoenix from San Jose. I mean seriously, have you tried easily selecting regions on Digital Ocean. That is where the planet is now.
Taking that disappointment over to Twitter and then decided hey I could just delete the whole tenancy that I created, start a new one, and select a different home region that way. Made total sense and was simple enough. I go to admin, delete tenancy, and am greeted with, "The work request to delete your tenancy could not be initiated. Please try again or contact support." At this point that 24GB RAM is starting to feel like it can take a hike, but I power through, reach out to support, and the conversation went something like this.
Conclusion
While I still comprehend the idea of calling the support number I just wanted to share the experience while it was still fresh and happening. I would be remised if I didn't say the following. I am not Oracle's market. So if you are in the same boat of experimentation, learning, and finding that perfect infrastructure, this may or may not be for you. Hey, I think if you start your home region in US East you could probably have a smooth ride on testing out the infrastructure. I probably just had bad luck and selected an option that I feel should have told me upfront hey here is what is available in this region, are you sure you would like to select this region. Done, simple, frustrations eased.
OCI is set up for Enterprise. But, dated enterprises that don't appreciate intuitive UI/UX.