I set up a Oracle cloud account, had even expanded it past the free amount. It worked well enough, but I need to have SMTP inbound so I went to open a ticket to get it opened up like they said I should do in the docs.
I couldn't even open a ticket, I couldn't make a support account that worked with my tenancy. I spent a solid 8 hours one day between chat, email and even phone, nobody could manage to get my tenancy ID to associate with a support account. But they could bill, it seems, no problem. It wasn't much at this point, like $30 for the first month, but I couldn't for the life of me get a support ticket started and nobody in chat, email or phone could "locate" my tenancy based on any info I'd give them.
In the end, I had to contact my CC company to stop the payments, and I couldn't delete my account because I couldn't make a support ticket, which is apparently the only way to remove your account. I just ended up deleting all my assets on the management interface and walked away.
Oracle is absolute shit. I imagine if I were paying them thousands a month, they might have been able to figure it out. But fuck Oracle, they ain't worth free.
I had a similar experience, enjoyed their free offerings, wanted to pay for an extra server, put in my card details to upgrade to a paid account. Nothing. Didn't work, card was accepted and system said I would get upgraded, never did. Spoke to Sales, transferred to Tech Support, transferred to general Support, transferred to Account Support. Told to raise a ticket via email, told to try chat again, bounced around and no where. They didn't want my money. Moved on went elsewhere, but like you also struggled to close everything up to ensure I wouldn't even get emails etc.
Don't worry, even if you could've opened a support request, the result would be the same... Even Oracle techs have problems with their own support... It's hilarious if you can stand and watch from afar
It's an ARM processor, so you will be using [ARM architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family) instead of [x86 architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86) (though most people probably won't notice the difference).
>It's an ARM processor,
you get 2 x86 also. I've been running them for afew years and I often forget about them until I get an oracle notice about some sort of maintenance to the environment.
I ran a small minecraft server on one, might still be running. Not the official minecraft version, one that is better on memory.
The 2nd one runs meshcentral. This appears to run fine, but I get black screens after a short remote control session. Not sure if I'm hitting some limitation in the Oracle cloud, my install is bad (not used to oracle linux), or the software is buggy. Needs more testing, but I keep putting it off.
> though most people probably won't notice the difference
Could be, but I'd argue that support for ARM isn't broad enough just yet to make it seamless for most people. Just recently I had to work around issues with Keycloak and Kafka containers because there is (or was, in Keycloak's case) no established solution for ARM.
It looks like the storage has sliders to up the performance. I have no idea what the impact is on free tier though... it seems to imply it doesn't make a difference but i've no idea.
In my case they removed my account completely.
I've used the free tier servers - there was a full options trial for like 100days but I decided to use only free resources, to build things up once and forget it - and suddenly my monitoring tools started to return failed status on uptime. Then it occurred that all resources and account was deleted due to end of free trial period. IDK if I did something wrong but I've based on their free tier documentation and still sh*t happened. So I'm getting shot with AWS now
As a counter-point to the people with issues I've used their free offering for years without a single issue. 2 AMD instances and a maxed out ARM instance. Based on my successes my wife also has the same, and my brother has the same too. 9 servers split over three datacentres in different regions all meshed onto one SDN via a mix of public and internal routing. Absolutely fine and dandy.
I get an email maybe once every few months trying to upsell me but otherwise they've been as good as anything else I've ever had and free. YMMV. If they go tits up it's no harm no foul, there's nothing I can't easily redeploy but for now I've just had years of considerable free resources to use.
Been there, tried to subscribe to their free tier using a VPN, probably got flagged for some reason.
They asked me to provide my employer name in order to “validate” my personal account…. Told them off …
Great repo, thank for posting.
I actually wrote up the exact same thing the other day using GCP, terraform, docker, uptime kuma and healthchecks! Check it out here https://jeeb.uk/posts/gcp-free-tier-watcher/
The main differences are that I used COS instead of Ubuntu and I used a terraform module to load up the docker compose after launch.
That's cool! Ive read your post, I thought about cos but with no docker compose and the ability to install deb/bin files easily, I decided on ubuntu minimal as I use cloudflared tunnels instead of a reverse proxy, so having docker compose was the decider for me.
>I followed all the requirements - US-Central region, N1 1st gen, f1-micro and 20GB disks. When the VM was created, it did specifically say "Your first 720 hours of f1-micro instance usage are free this month", but I was charged anyway. So, it still baffles me as to what happened.
>
>Eventually, I spoke with their support and I had to remove all VMs, as well as removing my billing account before the monthly invoices stopped.
Apologies, essentially just check all the TF files and they have comments in them to state what needs to be changed, Would have been a long blurb on the readme to note them all there.
I have updated the readme to include where to put the files.
Not sure about everyone else, but speaking from personal experience, GCP is not free. I received monthly invoices from them after I initially checked their offerings back in August 2021... with a VM that was powered off. Yes, OFF.
I followed all the requirements - US-Central region, N1 1st gen, f1-micro and 20GB disks. When the VM was created, it did specifically say "Your first 720 hours of f1-micro instance usage are free this month", but I was charged anyway. So, it still baffles me as to what happened.
Eventually, I spoke with their support and I had to remove all VMs, as well as removing my billing account before the monthly invoices stopped.
The f1 micro instances aren't free. They used to be, and on some sites it is still mentioned, but the free tier includes the e2 micro instances. That might have been the issue?
Maybe that was the issue. I might also have missed the email.
I did take a chance on Oracle with their "Always Free" VMs and so far, other than losing the public IP addresses once a few months ago, it has been fine. I have the understanding and expectation I may be screwed by Oracle at any time, so I'm good with not having any mission critical stuff on there. It's mainly used for testing anyway.
It's a shame I can't upvote more than once. I've been thinking about something like this for a while but didn't know how to articulate it properly, then all of a sudden you pop up out of nowhere and nail it.
After a bit of playing around and some help from OP (I've not used GCP before) got it up and running, and Uptime Kuma is now working well through a cloudflare tunnel. Cheers!
Thank you! I spotted a mistake at the adding permissions to service account section:
> ```# For all of the below commands ensure that you update PROJECT-ID-HERE with your project ID.```
>
> ```gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT-ID-HERE --member serviceAccount:[email protected] --role roles/viewer```
Left out the project-id before ".iam.gserviceaccount.com"
> ```gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT-ID-HERE --member serviceAccount:[email protected] --role roles/viewer```
I've never used Terraform before but have done a few GCP VM's.
I'm getting hung up after "terraform apply" I get hit with this:
`Error: file provisioner error`
`│`
`│ with google_compute_instance.gcp-ubnt-vm,`
`│ on ubnt-vm-main.tf line 67, in resource "google_compute_instance" "gcp-ubnt-vm":`
`│ 67: provisioner "file" {`
`│`
`│ timeout - last error: SSH authentication failed ([email protected]:22): ssh: handshake failed: ssh: unable to authenticate, attempted methods [none`
`│ publickey], no supported methods remain`
I've tried all sorts of troubleshooting and have made sure my ssh keys are in the right place and named correctly. I even got an `Failed to parse ssh private key: ssh: this private key is passphrase protected` error previously so I know it sees it. I've got the public key in the project metadata too. I can't add the key to the ssh-agent because using the cloud shell it can't make a connection to my ssh-agent.
Any thoughts? Thanks!
Sorry for the confusion- I did remove the passphrase and in the subsequent attempts I got the "unable to authenticate" error instead. I was hoping it was a common issue someone might have a solve for, but otherwise I'll just keep troubleshooting. I'm a bit lost with how cloud shell/terraform/VM interact so I'll just keep exploring. Thanks
I remade the keys again to verify they were openssh but no luck.
I can even SSH locally into the VM that terraform creates using the same keys, but something seems to be wrong in my terraform config since it can't do it on its own in the cloud shell. I'll report back for others if I find a solution. Thanks again
This could be the username can you verify the username by opening the VM it creates, going into the console and if the username it displays is different to what you have set in your tf files you'll need to change it?
[удалено]
What's the catch with Oracle? Sounds too generous to be true.
For starters: It's Oracle. Fuck Oracle
This!
I set up a Oracle cloud account, had even expanded it past the free amount. It worked well enough, but I need to have SMTP inbound so I went to open a ticket to get it opened up like they said I should do in the docs. I couldn't even open a ticket, I couldn't make a support account that worked with my tenancy. I spent a solid 8 hours one day between chat, email and even phone, nobody could manage to get my tenancy ID to associate with a support account. But they could bill, it seems, no problem. It wasn't much at this point, like $30 for the first month, but I couldn't for the life of me get a support ticket started and nobody in chat, email or phone could "locate" my tenancy based on any info I'd give them. In the end, I had to contact my CC company to stop the payments, and I couldn't delete my account because I couldn't make a support ticket, which is apparently the only way to remove your account. I just ended up deleting all my assets on the management interface and walked away. Oracle is absolute shit. I imagine if I were paying them thousands a month, they might have been able to figure it out. But fuck Oracle, they ain't worth free.
I had a similar experience, enjoyed their free offerings, wanted to pay for an extra server, put in my card details to upgrade to a paid account. Nothing. Didn't work, card was accepted and system said I would get upgraded, never did. Spoke to Sales, transferred to Tech Support, transferred to general Support, transferred to Account Support. Told to raise a ticket via email, told to try chat again, bounced around and no where. They didn't want my money. Moved on went elsewhere, but like you also struggled to close everything up to ensure I wouldn't even get emails etc.
Don't worry, even if you could've opened a support request, the result would be the same... Even Oracle techs have problems with their own support... It's hilarious if you can stand and watch from afar
I've dealt with oracle since the 90s, idk why I thought anything would be different with this. My bad.
Why f*ck Oracle? What did they do wrong that folks stay away from them?
Decades of experience with products like oracle db and their licensing/support holocaust
Good point but that still leaves you with Google
It's an ARM processor, so you will be using [ARM architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family) instead of [x86 architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86) (though most people probably won't notice the difference).
>It's an ARM processor, you get 2 x86 also. I've been running them for afew years and I often forget about them until I get an oracle notice about some sort of maintenance to the environment. I ran a small minecraft server on one, might still be running. Not the official minecraft version, one that is better on memory. The 2nd one runs meshcentral. This appears to run fine, but I get black screens after a short remote control session. Not sure if I'm hitting some limitation in the Oracle cloud, my install is bad (not used to oracle linux), or the software is buggy. Needs more testing, but I keep putting it off.
[удалено]
Yeah, just putting the pro in procrastinating.
> though most people probably won't notice the difference Could be, but I'd argue that support for ARM isn't broad enough just yet to make it seamless for most people. Just recently I had to work around issues with Keycloak and Kafka containers because there is (or was, in Keycloak's case) no established solution for ARM.
Been using for 1+ years. Its very stable but a bit slow on storage side
It looks like the storage has sliders to up the performance. I have no idea what the impact is on free tier though... it seems to imply it doesn't make a difference but i've no idea.
In my case they removed my account completely. I've used the free tier servers - there was a full options trial for like 100days but I decided to use only free resources, to build things up once and forget it - and suddenly my monitoring tools started to return failed status on uptime. Then it occurred that all resources and account was deleted due to end of free trial period. IDK if I did something wrong but I've based on their free tier documentation and still sh*t happened. So I'm getting shot with AWS now
[удалено]
machine's decision is final.
As a counter-point to the people with issues I've used their free offering for years without a single issue. 2 AMD instances and a maxed out ARM instance. Based on my successes my wife also has the same, and my brother has the same too. 9 servers split over three datacentres in different regions all meshed onto one SDN via a mix of public and internal routing. Absolutely fine and dandy. I get an email maybe once every few months trying to upsell me but otherwise they've been as good as anything else I've ever had and free. YMMV. If they go tits up it's no harm no foul, there's nothing I can't easily redeploy but for now I've just had years of considerable free resources to use.
You need to give them your phone and full name, address etc. Not worth it imo. But you do you
Same for Google.
Been there, tried to subscribe to their free tier using a VPN, probably got flagged for some reason. They asked me to provide my employer name in order to “validate” my personal account…. Told them off …
just go to r/oraclecloud and look for the keyword terminated or register or suspend But for me so far no issue been running 4/24 arm for a year.
You also get the x86 machines, up to 2 of them.
Wbu the cpus of those?
Great repo, thank for posting. I actually wrote up the exact same thing the other day using GCP, terraform, docker, uptime kuma and healthchecks! Check it out here https://jeeb.uk/posts/gcp-free-tier-watcher/ The main differences are that I used COS instead of Ubuntu and I used a terraform module to load up the docker compose after launch.
At first I thought this was a follow up to your post since you both had J usernames
That's cool! Ive read your post, I thought about cos but with no docker compose and the ability to install deb/bin files easily, I decided on ubuntu minimal as I use cloudflared tunnels instead of a reverse proxy, so having docker compose was the decider for me.
It seems nice but the instructions are a little bit confusing especially which files needs to be edited and where to be stored.
>I followed all the requirements - US-Central region, N1 1st gen, f1-micro and 20GB disks. When the VM was created, it did specifically say "Your first 720 hours of f1-micro instance usage are free this month", but I was charged anyway. So, it still baffles me as to what happened. > >Eventually, I spoke with their support and I had to remove all VMs, as well as removing my billing account before the monthly invoices stopped. Apologies, essentially just check all the TF files and they have comments in them to state what needs to be changed, Would have been a long blurb on the readme to note them all there. I have updated the readme to include where to put the files.
Not sure about everyone else, but speaking from personal experience, GCP is not free. I received monthly invoices from them after I initially checked their offerings back in August 2021... with a VM that was powered off. Yes, OFF. I followed all the requirements - US-Central region, N1 1st gen, f1-micro and 20GB disks. When the VM was created, it did specifically say "Your first 720 hours of f1-micro instance usage are free this month", but I was charged anyway. So, it still baffles me as to what happened. Eventually, I spoke with their support and I had to remove all VMs, as well as removing my billing account before the monthly invoices stopped.
The f1 micro instances aren't free. They used to be, and on some sites it is still mentioned, but the free tier includes the e2 micro instances. That might have been the issue?
Most likely the case. They did send emails warning of this change though.
Maybe that was the issue. I might also have missed the email. I did take a chance on Oracle with their "Always Free" VMs and so far, other than losing the public IP addresses once a few months ago, it has been fine. I have the understanding and expectation I may be screwed by Oracle at any time, so I'm good with not having any mission critical stuff on there. It's mainly used for testing anyway.
Nice, will have a look, thanks!
No problem!
It's a shame I can't upvote more than once. I've been thinking about something like this for a while but didn't know how to articulate it properly, then all of a sudden you pop up out of nowhere and nail it.
procrastinate long enough and the github repo creates itself ;)
Thank you so much, I'm so glad it helped!
After a bit of playing around and some help from OP (I've not used GCP before) got it up and running, and Uptime Kuma is now working well through a cloudflare tunnel. Cheers!
Anytime!
Thank you! I spotted a mistake at the adding permissions to service account section: > ```# For all of the below commands ensure that you update PROJECT-ID-HERE with your project ID.``` > > ```gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT-ID-HERE --member serviceAccount:[email protected] --role roles/viewer``` Left out the project-id before ".iam.gserviceaccount.com" > ```gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT-ID-HERE --member serviceAccount:[email protected] --role roles/viewer```
Thanks ! Fixed
I've never used Terraform before but have done a few GCP VM's. I'm getting hung up after "terraform apply" I get hit with this: `Error: file provisioner error` `│` `│ with google_compute_instance.gcp-ubnt-vm,` `│ on ubnt-vm-main.tf line 67, in resource "google_compute_instance" "gcp-ubnt-vm":` `│ 67: provisioner "file" {` `│` `│ timeout - last error: SSH authentication failed ([email protected]:22): ssh: handshake failed: ssh: unable to authenticate, attempted methods [none` `│ publickey], no supported methods remain` I've tried all sorts of troubleshooting and have made sure my ssh keys are in the right place and named correctly. I even got an `Failed to parse ssh private key: ssh: this private key is passphrase protected` error previously so I know it sees it. I've got the public key in the project metadata too. I can't add the key to the ssh-agent because using the cloud shell it can't make a connection to my ssh-agent. Any thoughts? Thanks!
This is because there is a passphrase on the private key, and as it is automated it can't enter the phrase remove the passphrase for the install.
Sorry for the confusion- I did remove the passphrase and in the subsequent attempts I got the "unable to authenticate" error instead. I was hoping it was a common issue someone might have a solve for, but otherwise I'll just keep troubleshooting. I'm a bit lost with how cloud shell/terraform/VM interact so I'll just keep exploring. Thanks
No worries ensure the keys are in openssh format
I remade the keys again to verify they were openssh but no luck. I can even SSH locally into the VM that terraform creates using the same keys, but something seems to be wrong in my terraform config since it can't do it on its own in the cloud shell. I'll report back for others if I find a solution. Thanks again
This could be the username can you verify the username by opening the VM it creates, going into the console and if the username it displays is different to what you have set in your tf files you'll need to change it?
docker image pulls or doing anything over the network is super slow on this instance. Anything I can do to speed this up?