I've been running several virtual machines on Oracle Cloud for more than four years. Around Christmas, I terminated an Ampere instance, but I haven't been able to recreate it because the region keeps reporting that there isn't enough host capacity. More recently, I stopped my always-free AMD instance, and now I can't start that one either for the same reason. I've been retrying for over a week. Has Oracle ended or significantly restricted its free tier, or is this just a capacity problem?
3 Answers
It may not mean the free tier is over. ARM capacity can be extremely difficult to obtain, and one user reported needing to retry periodically for about three weeks before getting a two-core, 12 GB ARM instance in Stockholm. The one-core, 1 GB x86 instance was available immediately, so availability seems to vary by region and shape.
There may also be newer limits on free resources. Instances exceeding the allowed allocation can be stopped until they’re manually resized to fit within the current limits, reportedly two OCPUs and 12 GB of memory. Check the instance shape and allocation before assuming the account has lost free-tier access.
A capacity error usually means Oracle has no available hardware for that particular shape in the selected availability domain, not necessarily that your free account has been disabled. Trying another availability domain or region, and retrying at different times, may help. The free resources are useful, but availability has always been inconsistent.
I thought the free virtual machines were limited to one vCPU and 1 GB of memory, at least in the regions I’ve used recently.