Powerful Virtual Machine on Cloud for FREE — Always
Ever wondered to have a powerful Virtual Machine/Compute Instance on cloud for free?
Check it out !!!
Oracle Cloud provides a facility of Always FREE Virtual Machines. These Free VM works even after the trial period/credits expires. Each tenancy in Oracle Cloud have options of following Always free VM/Compute for everyone:
- Two VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances.
- 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 (i.e. 4 machines of 1 OCPU and 6GB ram or any multiple of 1 OCPU & 6 GB up to max 4 times).
You can check out the following link for more information https://www.oracle.com/in/cloud/free/
Quick setup instructions
Register with Oracle Cloud for a new account. The set up process would require a Credit card for payment validation.
Once the registration process is complete, you will have 400 credits for a month to try out Oracle Cloud services. But for the always free services no credits will be used.
Lets set up 1 OCPU 6 GB RAM Arm Flex compute instance for free. We would use ubuntu as an Operating System.
Once on home page, select Create a VM Instance.
Provide a suitable name for the instance and on then Image and shape > Edit > Change Image > Select Canonical Ubuntu > Select Image
Next on Shape > Change Shape > Select as per the below screenshot
For SSH Keys, if you have an existing pair of key — you can upload your public key else let it be default as Generate new key. But make sure to download your Private and Public key.
Next click on Create and you are done. Wait for 5 min for the cluster to start.
Now, you can see the public IP of the machine and the username (default name for Canonical — Ubuntu is ubuntu).
Now to connect this system we will use SSH with out private file (.ppk). In case you have .pem file or .key file — download Puttygen and generate your .ppk file.
We will use putty to connect the instance using the .ppk file (private key file) and the public IP of the machine (hostname@public_ip).
Click on SSH > Auth > Browse > Select your private key file > Open
And Congratulations you should now be in your free VM now.
Now you have an 1 OCPU 6 GB RAM and 50 GB boot volume Compute Instance/Virtual Machine for FREE.
Check out my next article to connect this instance with Remote Desktop.
