Free Oracle Cloud: 13. Final things to take away

This post is the last post of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

By now we have seen how you can set up the different components from the Always Free Oracle Cloud.

During Oracle Open World I talked to the people behind the Always Free Oracle Cloud, and they told me that when your account is inactive for a specified amount of time (I forgot if it's 5 days, or a week or more?), your instance is being backed-up to the Object Storage. You can see it as a VM which is being put in stand-by or halted and saved to disk. When you need it again, it can be restored, but it takes time and it might be annoying when you don't know this is what is happening.

If you have a production app running in the Fee Oracle Cloud, be sure people use your app at least once inside the window Oracle foresees. Maybe in the future, Oracle could foresee a setting where we can specify the (in-)activity window as a developer.

I'm really impressed by this free offering of Oracle and see many use cases for development environments and small to midsize applications. I believe the limits we get in the free plan are really generous of Oracle and much more than any other cloud provider. 

Here's a quick overview of what it looks like at the time of writing:

• 2 Autonomous Databases, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB storage
• 2 Compute virtual machines, each with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory
• Storage:  2 Block Volumes, 100 GB total. 10 GB Object Storage. 10 GB Archive Storage.
• Additional Services:  Load Balancer, 1 instance, 10 Mbps bandwidth. Monitoring, 500 million ingestion data points, 1 billion retrieval data points. Notifications, 1 million delivery options per month, 1,000 emails sent per month. Outbound Data Transfer, 10 TB per month.

So what if you outgrow these limits? It means your applications are successful, so you can be proud of that :) and at that time hopefully, there's enough revenue to upgrade to a Paid Oracle Cloud plan. This can be done super easy... you click the upgrade to the paid plan button and there you go!

Oracle will copy your DB, instance, ... and you go from there.

The way that Oracle is doing the upgrade is really cool, as it means you keep your free instance. So I see myself doing some development on the free instance, then for production upgrade to a paid plan. At that time I still have the development environment. The other free service could be the TEST environment, so you have DEV, TEST both free and PROD paid.

If you didn't check it out by now, go and try out the FREE Oracle Cloud yourself by going to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ :)

Thanks Oracle!