Oracle Cloud Giving Away Ampere Arm A1 Instances Always Free
A few years ago we covered the Oracle Cloud Gets an Always Free Tier. Previously, one would get two AMD EPYC based compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU and 1GB of memory each. Let us call that what it is, not much. The bonus though is that, unlike the AWS Free Tier, this is an Always Free tier. Now, Oracle is upping the ante (significantly) with its new Ampere Arm A1 offering.
Although this has been announced for some time, the Oracle Cloud Ampere Altra offering is finally live. One can see that in the list of available “shapes” we have a bare-metal machine offering. These machines each have two Ampere Altra 80 core 3.0GHz CPUs. Beyond that, there is 100Gbps networking and 1TB of memory.
Why you are likely here though is due to the virtual machine. One can see this is Always Free Eligible. We can select the Ampere instance which is on the main Shapes listing not as a “specialty” instance type. Here we can make a VM.Standard.A1.Flex instance.
Flex allows one to configure the amount of CPU and memory in an instance. In the Always Free tier, we get four cores and up to 24GB of memory so, in theory, we could make smaller instances. Still, we decided to go big and make one large instance.
