Oracle added thirteen additional new “Always Free” services to Oracle Cloud Free Tier last June, including Ampere A1 Arm Compute, Autonomous JSON Database, NoSQL, APEX Application Development, Logging, Service Connector Hub, Application Performance Monitoring (APM), flexible load balancer, flexible network load balancer, VPN Connect V2, Oracle Security Zones, Oracle Security Advisor, and OCI Bastion.
So that means you could register an account for free, albeit a credit card or debit card is required for a $1 hold released after a few days, and use up to four Arm-based Ampera A1 cores with 24GB RAM for evaluation for free forever.
Oracle Always Free services include:
- Infrastructure
- 2x AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory each
- 4x Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs.
- Note: 1x OCPU on x86 CPU Architecture (AMD and Intel) = 2x vCPUs; 1x OCPU on Arm CPU Architecture (Ampere) = 1x vCPU
- 2x Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total.
- 10 GB Object Storage.
- 10 GB Archive Storage.
- Resource Manager: managed Terraform.
- 5x OCI Bastions.
- Databases –
- Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous JSON Database, or APEX Application Development. Two databases total, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage.
- NoSQL Database with 133 million reads per month, 133 million writes per month, 25 GB storage per table, up to 3 tables.
- Observability and Management
- Monitoring: 500 million ingestion datapoints, 1 billion retrieval datapoints.
- Application Performance Monitoring: 1000 tracing events per hour.
- Logging: 10 GB per month.
- Notifications: 1 million sent through https per month, 1000 sent through email per month.
- Service Connector Hub: 2 service connectors.
- Additional services
- Flexible Load Balancer: 1 instance, 10 Mbps.
- Flexible Network Load Balancer.
- Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month.
- Virtual Cloud Networks (VCN): Maximum of 2 VCNs, includes IPv4 and IPv6 support.
- VCN Flow Logs: Up to 10 GB per month shared across OCI Logging services.
- Site-to-Site VPN: 50 IPSec connections.
- Content Management Starter Edition: 5000 assets per month.
Oracle notes that Amazon Web Services (AWS) also offers a free tier but limited to 12 months with one database, 20 GB, one instance of Arm Compute, 30 GB block volume, and 5 GB object storage.
For the first 30 days, Oracle also offers US$300 in free credits for access to other Oracle Cloud services including Databases, Analytics, Compute, and Container Engine for Kubernetes, up to eight instances, and up to 5 TB of storage. After 30 days, you can still use the “Always Free” services listed above. If you’d like to give it a try, go over to Oracle website to get started.
Thanks to Maurer.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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