FOOD FOR THOUGHT Is Oracle's free offer still worth a try?

[Halea]

As I'm getting ready for an unusually boring weekend (don't ask), I thought I would give a shot at a free Oracle cloud instance and setup IncrediblePBX per @wardmundy 's article.

Thus far I only read the article and checked Oracle's Always Free resources page.

I think I'm starting to have a grasp on things although I find Oracle's language and description of the service a bit confusing. But before proceeding with a fee account opening and the install I wanted to ask two questions:
1) The always free resources mention that two types of "shapes" (which I understand means type of VPS) are available; VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro with an AMD processor and VM.Standard.A1.Flex with an ARM processor. Is there any particular reason to pick the ARM cpu as opposed to the AMD cpu?
2) It has been almost a year since Ward's article was published. Based on posts on this forum many of you have tested or been using Oracle's free service. Do you have any advice for someone coming on board this late? Any pitfalls to avoid? I understand free account still requires credit card number and cell phone. I just don't want to do something wrong and accrue an open ended bill owing to my mistakes.

Any help/suggestion greatly appreciated.
Thank you and have a great weekend.

 

[billsimon]

Only if it's a really boring weekend. Have a book at hand. You'll need something to do while you wait for their super slow and dodgy dashboard to load.

 

[kenn10]

@Halea To answer your questions:
1) You get 2 E2.Micro and 4 A1.Flex instances for free. The A1 instances have been in short supply and can be hard to catch. The ARM CPU's are quite fast and with the A1, you get up to 6 GB of memory with the instance.

2) The Rocky and Oracle Linux instances are pretty much useless for IncrediblePBX 2027. Rocky keeps changing stuff that breaks the installation and Oracle Linux was just too much hassle to attack.

I strongly recommend Ubuntu 22.04 if you want to use the instances for IncrediblePBX 2027. I have posted a number of "things to do" before installing IncrediblePBX. You do not have to use Oracle VPN to access them if you set up the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg parameters and adjust the /etc/ssh/sshd_config files.

So far, I only use Oracle VM's for sandbox play and testing. They haven't failed on me in a year or so. It used to be possible to install Debian on the E2.Micro instances but Oracle has taken that away from the free accounts.

 

[KNERD]

@Halea To answer your questions:
1) You get 2 E2.Micro and 4 A1.Flex instances for free. The A1 instances have been in short supply and can be hard to catch. The ARM CPU's are quite fast and with the A1, you get up to 6 GB of memory with the instance.

Actually it is up to 24GB of RAM.

 

[Halea]

You mean you can allocate all 24GB of RAM to one and only A1 instance? That's quite hefty!

As the saying goes "there is no free lunch" (except maybe when we do ... or did ... our "share the harvest" thing). So, what's the catch with Oracle's offer?
I mean, the resources offered for free seem to be quite substantial. What do they expect in return even if it's in the long run? The last time I checked - and since I've been told that - their cloud service was hardly competitive with the other big names out there.

 

[KNERD]

You mean you can allocate all 24GB of RAM to one and only A1 instance? That's quite hefty!

As the saying goes "there is no free lunch" (except maybe when we do ... or did ... our "share the harvest" thing). So, what's the catch with Oracle's offer?
I mean, the resources offered for free seem to be quite substantial. What do they expect in return even if it's in the long run? The last time I checked - and since I've been told that - their cloud service was hardly competitive with the other big names out there.

Yes a total of 24GB of RAM per instance.

The catch is the VPS cannot be considered "idle" in a month's time. If it is, they will delete it without any warning.

If you do not care about the AMD VPS with only 1GB of RAM, you can upgrade to the paid account, and be guaranteed an A1 instance, and not worry about the idle deletion. For the paid account, they will do a one time $100 USD charge to a CC which then they immediately cancel it.

You still get the up to 4 A1 with up to 24GB of RAM for free. But now you will see an option to bump an instance to something around 500GB of RAM and a lot more cores.

 

[dicko]

for what it's worth, it was for me a complete waste of my time, probably 18 months ago, I have two so called machines that I can get to occasionally.

 

[tjspcs]

I was late to the Oracle Cloud thing and had no idea it had existed until a few weeks back. Right now I have several deployments that are all Ampere shape instances. Latest one is running Incredible PBX 2027-D as an LXC container as well as Docker with various containers all on top of a minimal Debian 11 Bullseye host. Took my dumb self a lot of trial and error. After comparing several of Ward's installer scripts and looking over some discussions here I was able to revise a new script that works perfectly with a fresh copy of Bullseye on A1 aarch/arm64 architecture. The performance is excellent compared to other low cost VPS hosting services who are so oversold it's not even funny.

Some stats from an A1 instance with 2 OCPU, 12GB RAM, 100GB Disk.

Geekbench 6 Score:
Single Core - 1071
Multi Core - 1785

QEMU KVM Virtual Machine - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a QEMU KVM Virtual Machine with an ARM ARMv8 processor.

browser.geekbench.com

Processor : Neoverse-N1
CPU cores : 2
RAM : 11.7 GiB
Swap : 1.9 GiB
Disk : 96.0 GiB
Distro : Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Kernel : 5.10.0-21-arm64
VM Type : KVM

IPv4 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP : Oracle Corporation
ASN : AS31898 Oracle Corporation
Host : Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (us-phoenix-1)
Location : Phoenix, Arizona (AZ)
Country : United States

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (Location, Upload, Download, Ping):
Clouvider - NYC, NY, US (10G) --- 1.46 Gbits/sec --- 1.17 Gbits/sec --- 57.4 ms
Clouvider - Dallas, TX, US (10G) --- 2.00 Gbits/sec --- 1.90 Gbits/sec --- 19.8 ms
Clouvider - Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) --- 2.00 Gbits/sec --- 2.00 Gbits/sec --- 8.79 ms

# lscpu
Architecture: aarch64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 2
Vendor ID: ARM
Model name: Neoverse-N1
BogoMIPS: 50.00
Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs

 

[tjspcs]

.....

iperf3 Network Speed Tests (Location, Upload, Download, Ping):
Clouvider - NYC, NY, US (10G) --- 1.46 Gbits/sec --- 1.17 Gbits/sec --- 57.4 ms
Clouvider - Dallas, TX, US (10G) --- 2.00 Gbits/sec --- 1.90 Gbits/sec --- 19.8 ms
Clouvider - Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) --- 2.00 Gbits/sec --- 2.00 Gbits/sec --- 8.79 ms

# lscpu
Architecture: aarch64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 2
Vendor ID: ARM
Model name: Neoverse-N1
BogoMIPS: 50.00
Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 atomics fphp asimdhp cpuid asimdrdm lrcpc dcpop asimddp ssbs

fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50):
===============================
4k Block Size
Read -- 15.79 MB/s (3.9k IOPS)
Write -- 15.81 MB/s (3.9k IOPS)
Total -- 31.60 MB/s (7.9k IOPS)

64k Block Size
Read -- 32.94 MB/s (514 IOPS)
Write -- 33.92 MB/s (530 IOPS)
Total -- 66.86 MB/s (1.0k IOPS)

512k Block Size
Read -- 29.28 MB/s (57 IOPS)
Write -- 31.79 MB/s (62 IOPS)
Total -- 61.08 MB/s (119 IOPS)

1m Block Size
Read -- 28.86 MB/s (28 IOPS)
Write -- 32.20 MB/s (31 IOPS)
Total -- 61.07 MB/s (59 IOPS)

 

[wardmundy]

TIP: You will save yourself an enormous amount of frustration by deploying an OpenVPN client as soon as your new build comes on line. You then can access it in the traditional way using SSH from anywhere on your OpenVPN network.

 

[rchalk]

I have an account with one instance running fine, with Ubuntu and IncrediblePBX 2021. I would like to try 2022 with Rocky8. Do I use the arm or intel versions? I'm not sure which is compatible with the server. Thanks

 

[KNERD]

I have an account with one instance running fine, with Ubuntu and IncrediblePBX 2021. I would like to try 2022 with Rocky8. Do I use the arm or intel versions? I'm not sure which is compatible with the server. Thanks

It has been mentioned to NOT use Rocky 8 as they keep making changes which keeps breaking the PBX.

 

[kenn10]

I would like to try 2022 with Rocky8. Do I use the arm or intel versions? I'm not sure which is compatible with the server. Thanks

Rocky is a mess when mixed with Asterisk/FreePBX and pretty much incompatible with FreePBX-16. I'd recommend Ubuntu 2204 with IncrediblePBX-2027-U. You can run Ubuntu on either an A.1 instance or E.2 on Oracle.

See this thread on the FreePBX forum: https://community.freepbx.org/t/new-freepbx-install-setup-on-rocky-linux-9-1/89838

 

[ostridge]

Rocky is a mess when mixed with Asterisk/FreePBX and pretty much incompatible with FreePBX-16. I'd recommend Ubuntu 2204 with IncrediblePBX-2027-U. You can run Ubuntu on either an A.1 instance or E.2 on Oracle.

See this thread on the FreePBX forum: https://community.freepbx.org/t/new-freepbx-install-setup-on-rocky-linux-9-1/89838

It should be obvious that the two Oracle shapes of A1 or E2 require different architecture versions of Ubuntu 22.04; the required versions are. Both available from the create instance page.

 

[globalweb01]

I have three IncrediblePBX instances running on Oracle Ampere architecture under Ubuntu from the nerdvittles install script. These machines have been running for nearly a year, and have never had any downtime. Incredible performance, and you can't beat the price.

 

[ostridge]

Just added to my 2 london instances (Arm A1-flex U20.04 ipbx2021 Asterisk18, and AMD E2.1 U22.04 ipbx2027 Ast20.3)
Downgraded the A1 from 4ocpu 24GB memory, to 1ocpu 6GBmemory; then Added Oracle London (subject to availability) A1-flex U22.04 2027

 

[rchalk]

@Halea To answer your questions:
1) You get 2 E2.Micro and 4 A1.Flex instances for free. The A1 instances have been in short supply and can be hard to catch. The ARM CPU's are quite fast and with the A1, you get up to 6 GB of memory with the instance.

2) The Rocky and Oracle Linux instances are pretty much useless for IncrediblePBX 2027. Rocky keeps changing stuff that breaks the installation and Oracle Linux was just too much hassle to attack.

I strongly recommend Ubuntu 22.04 if you want to use the instances for IncrediblePBX 2027. I have posted a number of "things to do" before installing IncrediblePBX. You do not have to use Oracle VPN to access them if you set up the /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg parameters and adjust the /etc/ssh/sshd_config files.

So far, I only use Oracle VM's for sandbox play and testing. They haven't failed on me in a year or so. It used to be possible to install Debian on the E2.Micro instances but Oracle has taken that away from the free accounts.

Today I tried to set up a second instance, and as I approach the end, there is a setting for BOOT VOLUME, which I don't recall seeing in months past. At this point, it shows an estimated cost of $2.00/Month. Are the instances now costing money, or am I doing something wrong? Thanks

 

[kenn10]

Mine still show free. There is a banner at the top of your instance list that says:

Each tenancy gets the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free to create Ampere A1 Compute instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape (equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory). Each tenancy also gets two VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances for free. Learn more about Always Free resources

 

[kenn10]

there is a setting for BOOT VOLUME, which I don't recall seeing in months past.

Accept default on the boot volume, but if you terminate an instance, always check the box to delete the boot volume. More than one boot volume per instance and any storage buckets you create are billable.

 

[KNERD]

I upgraded to the paid account so I could test out other regions, make sure I always had access to the Amprer freebies, and not have any instances deleted.

It seems earlier this year all the regions started charging that boot volume fee everywhere. The documentation does indicate in some regions where there is limited resources, a fee could apply, but I have checked just about everywhere and they always want to charge a fee.

I have made sure I have no unused volumes hanging.