FYI Oracle Cloud "Always Free" not so free anymore?

[kenn10]

Perhaps they're looking for I/O on the WAN. My "idle" ones have active trunks so there is always some traffic.

 

[ostridge]

Oracle seems to be playing games with the "Always Free" instances. We got an email about a week ago saying two of ours were not being used and would be disabled. We have crontab jobs running on all 3 instances plus Asterisk, MySQL, Apache, and SendMail so... they are not idle. Yesterday, I spent a couple hours updating everything on all 3 instances. Then, last night they disabled and shut down two of them and sent me another email saying they weren't being used. We've restarted both of them this morning so we'll see how long that lasts.

I don't get why they differentiate between free tier and PAYG within the free resource?

 

[wardmundy]

I don't get why they differentiate between free tier and PAYG within the free resource?

Looking back through this thread, it appears they start billing for certain resources once you enter the PAYG category... despite their assurances to the contrary. Once they have your credit card, it's a steep climb to get your money back.

 

[KNERD]

One of the problems is they are not defining what "idle" means.

 

[LitleBill]

Borderline misleading to describe the service as "Always Free" and "Always Free Eligible"
Perhaps they should label it as "Always Freemium" or Pay as you go.

 

[ostridge]

One of the problems is they are not defining what "idle" means.

FWIW Here is what they say:

Idle Compute Instances​

Important

Link= Reclamation of Idle Compute Instances

Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true:

• CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15%
• Network utilization is less than 15%
• Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)

 

[wardmundy]

Funny that we're running three identical servers and only two got shut down.

 

[ostridge]

Funny that we're running three identical servers and only two got shut down.

There doesn't seem to be any consistent procedure at all - shutdown 2 - both restarted - now up to 2 x A1 (6gb) and 2 x E2 (1) servers. I suppose they are due to come for me again.
It will make some work to arrange additional load, the base install is under about 10Gb. and 15 % of cpu cycles and ?net traffic will be needing a script. But when done won't that likely be chargeable?

 

[KNERD]

There doesn't seem to be any consistent procedure at all - shutdown 2 - both restarted - now up to 2 x A1 (6gb) and 2 x E2 (1) servers. I suppose they are due to come for me again.
It will make some work to arrange additional load, the base install is under about 10Gb. and 15 % of cpu cycles and ?net traffic will be needing a script. But when done won't that likely be chargeable?

You could always install BOINC, then have the instance work on a project on a limited basis

Installing BOINC on Ubuntu - BOINC

boinc.berkeley.edu