A Free Cloud Offer for Personal Projects
For some personal experimentation projects, I’d like to use a virtual server somewhere out there. Since I have my personal domain (including this blog) hosted at Strato, I decided to use their offering, and got disappointed quickly. It costs money (not too little either), but the performance, reliability, and connectivity are rather bad. (10 seconds to establish an ssh connection? Come on.) Customer service offers the most basic helpfulness. So I closed that chapter.
Cloud providers looked like an interesting alternative. Google and AWS have good, industry-standard, offerings, and I had dabbled with them in the past in personal projects. Also, my previous and current companies use them.
But I was curious about my former employer, Oracle’s, cloud offering. They offer an “always free” tier that has some limited (of course) but interesting characteristics. After all, there are people running Minecraft servers in that tier, so it can’t be all weak and lame. In fact, the Ampere (ARM) server with up to 4 CPUs and 24 GB memory looks rather interesting.
Sign-up was weird but, given I know the place a bit from the inside, not too surprising. The sign-up confirmation page told me I’d receive an e-mail with the details within 15 minutes or so. Having not received that e-mail after several hours, I reached out to customer support, only to be told that approval for the provisioning had to be processed by several teams, which could take a while due to full queues. Yup, that’s typical bureaucratic Oracle, nothing unusual to see here.
Two days later, the account was provisioned in the German data center. I logged in, only to find a well structured and rather clear console. I worked my way through a tutorial for setting up a Docker environment, adapting it to the newer version of Oracle Linux I found in my VM, and it worked flawlessly. Performance was pleasant, ssh access instant. As mentioned, the console is fairly clear and usable.
What next? Should I set up that Minecraft server?
(Note that this isn't a paid ad at all.)
Tags: hacking