Getting Started with Oracle OCI Free Tier

In this short tutorial I will walkthrough on how to get started Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Free Tier recently announced at Oracle Open World 2019, what regions are currently LIVE, Availability Domains(Single AD vs Three AD) regions, check tenancy limits and more.

The free tier includes the following:

• 2 Autonomous Databases (Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing), each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage
• 2 Compute VMs, each with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory
• 2 Block Volumes, 100 GB total, with up to 5 free backups
• 10 GB Object Storage, 10 GB Archive Storage, and 50,000/month API requests
• 1 Load Balancer, 10 Mbps bandwidth
• 10 TB/month Outbound Data Transfer
• 500 million ingestion Datapoints and 1 billion Datapoints for Monitoring Service
• 1 million Notification delivery options per month and 1000 emails per month

Lets get started:

1. Head to : https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Click “Start for free”

2. Sign up

Click Next

3. Enter Account Details

Lets go a bit detail on the account details apart from the obvious ones

Account Name: this is unique, choose carefully as it will be the unique name for your tenant.

Home Region: This is important, as all your IAM/limits/etc are defined here.

Note: Always Free services are not available on all regions, check https://www.oracle.com/cloud/data-regions.html for full list services offered per region.

4. Validate your phone number

5. Enter Payment Details

6. Account Setup- Complete

First Time Login:

Once the account is setup, you will be presented with the login screen, notice the tenant name there, also notice the console URL, this should point to your home region(in my case it is US-Ashburn)

Home URL

Login Screen

Once logged in you’ll see the Landing Page

Landing Page

Now click the profile icon, Click your tenancy“Tenancy”

Here you are will see the tenancy details, the OCID(Oracle Cloud Unique Identifier) and additional details see two sections under “Resources”

1. Regions : You can subscribe to additional regions here
2. Service Limits Here you can view the limits for your tenancy, like number of resources(compute,database , block volume, etc) you can create or utilized.

The always free resources are always tagged “Always Free Eligibile”, something like below:

Always Free Eligible

Thats it, its a short tutorial to give a quick walk through of getting started with Oracle OCI.