You may know MySQL, Oracle Database, or even Java before, but did you know that they have their own cloud platform too? I’m talking about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI.

OCI’s always-free tier has made everyone in LET and LOC crazy. The free tier really makes people feel: WOW THIS IS SO GOOD. The thing is that it’s really hard to sign up, 90% or more people stuck in the payment verification, even though their card is working completely fine (even once, a guy uses his American Express Centurion (aka. Black Card) to sign up, and OCI refused to sign him up, so… It all depends on your luck.

Luckily, I’ve successfully signed one up. My Home Region is Canada Southeast (Montreal), let’s find that out.

The Always-Free tier offers 2 AMD-based x86_64 instances with 1/8 OCPU(or 2 vCPU if you are comfortable with that) and 1 GB RAM. As well, you can enjoy the ARM-based instance(s) up to 4 cores and 24 GB RAM (powered by Neoverse N1).

You can allocate the CPU and RAM by yourself. For example, you can either fire up 2, 2 cores & 12 GB RAM instances, or fire up 1, full 4 cores & 24 GB RAM

There’s a trick here, the drive for each instance can’t be smaller than 47 GB and the free tier only have 200 GB pooled, so if you have already allocated 94 GB for your 2 AMD instances, then you can only fire up 1 or 2 instances. Because of that, I suggest you guys to modify the disk all to 50 GB so that you won’t waste a single GB. (If you choose to fire up the 4&24 instance, make it 100 GB)

bench.sh for the free AMD instance.

The network is great, it is 50 Mbps before, now it has upgraded to 480 Mbps for free and it is amazing.

bench.sh for the free ARM instance. (I choose to fire up 4&24)

Network….. Holy f**k. I think the bottleneck is in the Speed test server rather than this server. I think it is 4.8 Gbps.

Reliability? Well don’t worry about that.

Try it, maybe there’s a chance to pass it.