Re: free ARM VPS

On 11 Jan 2024, at 4:00, infoomatic wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> While I am not afiliated with the vendor, I just want to give a little
> hint to you, just in case it is not known: Oracle has a "always free"
> tier with some services which are free to use. With the ARM Compute
> Instance you can have Ampere A1 cores and up to 24GB RAM (in total), 
> so
> up to 4 free ARM VPS.
>
> I have used it for my small personal projects, and it works great with
> FreeBSD, also the upgrade to FreeBSD 14 without problems.

Hey there! I am  affiliated with the vendor, my day job is coordinating 
the team that handles support tickets for Oracle Compute.

Some more info I hope is helpful:

- The only image available today is FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE for ARM64 with 
a UFS root fs. If you’re eagerly awaiting 13.3, 14.0, ZFS or x86_64, 
you should follow this ticket 
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=277831
- If you haven’t used FreeBSD in an ephemeral VPS environment (cough 
cloud cough), you should investigate cloud-init to bootstrap systems. If 
you want to debug cloud-init scripts super fast under jails, check out: 
https://lseek-urandom.blogspot.com/2024/02/using-freebsd-jails-to-debug-cloud-init.html
- You may hit out-of-capacity errors in some regions, Ampere cores are a 
great value and they can’t manufacture them fast enough for the 
demand. Also, the free-tier credits only apply in your original region: 
select it wisely! But Oracle keeps a certain buffer of unused capacity 
available for paying customers. So if you get out-of-capacity as a 
free-tier customer, giving Oracle your billing information means that 
you’ll get slightly better chance of getting an instance.


If you ever hit issues, please let me know at this email address or via 
mastodon at https://mstdn.social/@josephholsten
--
Joseph Holsten
+1-360-927-7234
joseph@josephholsten.com