It's sort of like a crack dealer's free tier. You know it's going to end miserably but you just can't help yourself.

Mines been running fine for years now

I also have a couple of ARM servers there, nothing fancy. The internal networks and machine are extremely snappy for what they provide. Even the containers I threw in run great.

If you need small needs, it's a good provider. The dashboard is very convoluted, though.

Not necessarily, use it for testing only (not production) and you will be fine.

I run a little kube cluster on it that serves as the brain for my home lab on it and it’s been cranking along just fine for the better part of half a year. It’s all IaC and ephemeral so if it died tomorrow I could just restart it. Quite generous for $0

Can you feasibly run a homelab C&C server on the free tier of any of the big 3?

It’s possible to run a single node cluster on GCP for almost free, especially if you’re creative with spot instance. But afaik, not really otherwise. OCI is far and away more generous, giving you 4 dedicated always on nodes, which is just enough to run a decent mini cluster

I know you're talking about the cloud offerings, but the idea of using just a little bit of crack as "not production" is hilarious to me.

> a crack dealer's free tier

Pretty sure GCP & AWS employ a lot of ex-Oracle people.

How much crack do you do a day?

Where do live that people are giving away crack?

I’ve heard of people being cut off without warning on the free tier.

Yes. Not only are there bad actors, but oracle aggressively culls underutilized instances. If you sign up and attach your billing info you won’t get that happening to you. I know, it sounds silly, but once I did that I had no issues. It’s difficult to even get instances provisioned if you don’t do that, it’s really only possible by having a script that runs and continually retries/requests instances. I’ve had my billing info tied to it and never had an issue with being charged or having instances deprovisioned the entire half year I’ve been using it.

I'm guessing the free tier available to OAI is not the same free tier available to anyone else.

They've been out of instances for years on free tier now. E.g. there is no free Ampere available anymore effectively.

Yeah, I use their free tier. At $0 it's the best offering. But I end up with racknerd for just raw Linux machine that I manage myself with `iptables` and friends.

I used their free tier. Didn’t meet my needs. Tried to delete my account. It fails to delete my tenent, can’t talk to support because it is free tier. Email support refused to help. Told me to pay to talk to support. So they want me to pay so I can have them delete my account.