They give you 4 nodes with 1 vcpu and 6GB RAM each for free forever by the way. Most other stuff has a free tier too.

I used it to learn terraform and have a kubernetes cluster running.

I know it's always trendy to bash oracle and simp for AWS, but it is THE best option for learning and hobbyists.

On a sofware salary, would rather pay the 20 something to a provider like hetzner instead of giving my personal info to oracle

That's very cool. I was going to get a hetzner for some hobby projects.

Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism? For some reason, I'd be more cautious about putting my card into Oracle's offering than anyone else.

> Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism?

No!

There are actually two free tiers.

The limited free tier you get without adding a CC and then this advanced "always free" tier I am using, where you have to use and verify a CC and have to pay big bucks if you mess up.

limited free tier: 300$ to be spent in 30 days

advanced always free tier: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

So it's free... Until is not. My take on this would be that if Oracle makes any change to that "free" tier and you do not take proper action you might be automatically charged hefty amounts from your credit card. No, thanks. It's way way safer to spend few bucks a month in other VPS options than get a big surprise on your credit card.

Privacy.com has always been a working general solution to this, for me. Disposable CC aliases with spending caps.

Privacy.com won't provide lawyers to you when Oracle sends letters of demand to you for unpaid invoices.

I know Oracle are notorious for scummy license enforcement, but in practice their Always Free tier is superior to Amazon's precisely because they will cut off your service rather than bill you arbitrary (huge) amounts.

The big limitation is the 10mbit egress bandwidth, but you can work around that with (free) Cloudflare.

Messing up with Oracle is a bit different from messing up with Google. I'll go with Hetzner which I love anyway. :)

You can also get all of that in a single node, which makes for a fairly beefy build server :)

Uh, you can get that level of compute locally easy peasy.

Learning terraform isn't hard, it's what you stitch together with terraform that is hard.

I think the point here is that free beats easy peasy, especially when learning a new skill, where your easy peasy isn't their easy peasy. And getting something up and running on Oracle Cloud with Terraform is nowhere near easy peasy for someone who never did anything with Terraform ;)

'Back in my day' we learned with VMs for free! The computer you have works without internet, for instance