After my student subscription to Microsoft Azure ended, I looked into other options. Then I heard of the generous offer of Oracle Cloud: 4 cores and 24 Gigs of RAM on ARM CPUs.
On AWS, that would cost you about 100$/month ! (2×
r6g.large+ 2×t4g.medium)
And that's free forever !
The – catch – is that these instances are Ampere A1 ARM CPUs, so a different architecture than your typical desk PC: software compiled for x86 won't work…
Luckily, most main open-source software already provides ARM packages. And running on a different architecture forces you to think about people running other archs: Raspberry Pis, Pinebooks, M1 Macs ...
One interesting thing about Oracle compared to other is that they offer a wide range of virtualisation technologies to cater specific entreprise needs. For instance, you can select between BIOS or UEFI for the firmware, VFIO/Paravirtualize/IDE/ISCI... for your disk, and even stuff like IOMMU !
Resources overview
The names of stuff is always a bit different on each cloud provider, so I'll make a list :
- Cloud name : Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
- Virtual Machines : Core Instances
- Object storage : Object Storage Buckets
- Isolated network: Virtual Cloud Network
- Identity & Access : Identity & Security
- Queues/Messaging : Service Connector Hub