Always Free Resources

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Always Free Resources

Learn what Always Free resources are available to all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure users.

All Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accounts (whether free or paid) have a set of resources that are free of charge in the home region of the tenancy, for the life of the account. These resources display the Always Free-eligible label in the Console (for OCI Ampere A1 Compute shapes, see Compute).

Using the Always Free resources, you can provision a virtual machine (VM) instance, an Oracle Autonomous AI Database<br>, and the networking, load balancing, and storage resources needed to support the applications that you want to build. With these resources, you can do things like run small-scale applications or perform proof-of-concept testing.

The following sections summarize the Oracle Cloud Always Free-eligible resources that you can provision in your tenancy.

Infrastructure

Certificates

All tenancies get five certificate authorities (CAs) and 150 certificates included in the<br>Always Free resources.

Compute

All tenancies get a set of Always Free resources in the Compute service for creating compute virtual machine (VM) instances. You must create the Always Free compute instances in your home region.

Note

If you receive an "out of host capacity" error when trying to create a Compute instance, this indicates a temporary lack of Always Free shapes in your home region. Try creating the instance in a different availability domain, or wait a while, then try to create the instance again. You can also choose to upgrade your account to Pay as You Go or another Paid account type, which gives you access to more types of Compute resources. Remember that Oracle doesn't charge for Always Free resources after you upgrade, and will only charge you for resource usage above the Always Free limits. You can use compartment quotas to control resource consumption within your account.

Available Shapes

Micro instances (AMD processor): All tenancies get up to two Always Free VM instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape, which has an AMD processor.

OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances (Arm processor): All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape, which has an Arm processor. For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory.

In regions with multiple availability domains:

You can create OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances in any availability domain, except South Korea North (Chuncheon).

Instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape can only be created in one availability domain.

Number of Compute Instances Available to Your Account

Depending on the size of the boot volume and the number of OCPUs that you allocate to each OCI Ampere A1 Compute instance, you can create one or two OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances, 2 OCPUs total. The minimum boot volume size for each instance is 47 GB, regardless of shape. Your account comes with 200 GB of Always Free<br>block volume storage which you use to create the boot volumes for your compute instances.

For example, using the default boot volume size of 47 GB, you could provision two instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape, and one OCI Ampere A1 Compute instance with 2 OCPUs or two OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances with 1 OCPU each, and zero instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape. Many combinations are possible, depending on how you allocate your block storage and OCI Ampere A1 Compute OCPUs. See Details of the Always Free compute instances for more information on allocating OCPU and memory resources when creating OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances.

IP Addresses for Compute Instances

You do not have to assign a public IPv4 address to every compute instance in your tenancy. You can create a compute instance in a public subnet without assigning the instance a public IP addresses, and create an instance in a private subnet.

Idle Compute Instances

Important

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 20%

Network utilization is less than 20%

Memory utilization is less than 20% (applies to A1 shapes only)

Details of the Always Free compute instances

VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape (AMD):

Processor: 1/8th of an OCPU with the ability to use additional CPU resources

Memory: 1 GB

Networking:  Includes one VNIC  with one public IP address and up to 50 Mbps network bandwidth via the internet. Traffic to private IPs, on-premise endpoints via a Dynamic Routing Gateway, or to endpoints within the same Oracle Cloud region is up to 480 Mbps.

Image:  Your choice of one of the following Always Free-eligible images:

Oracle Linux...