Its amazing, you have a better VPS than 15$ per month can get you on any VPS host, even if its ARM, its worth it.
As for CI/CD, I didn't know GiLlab gives you 50,000 minutes for public projects, the issue with gitlab is the recent limits make it really complex for an open source project to grow on GitLab, Yes I know there is the Gitlab Open source program, but its an unnecessary complications that doesn't exist on GitHub.
In comparison, AWS t3a.medium (2vCPU, 4GB RAM, burstable baseline 20%) will cost ~$27.45/month ($0.0376*730hr). DigitalOcean's 2vCPU 4GB Droplet will cost $24/month.
And for about the same price that AWS offers for their weak boxes ("~$27.45/mo"), Hetzner will give you 8 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM... Yes, the IPv4 cost is excluded, but it's only €0.61/month if you even want to have it.
If I have a complaint, it's the really, really, really complicated management console. It's like they looked at AWS and said, "okay, like this, but somehow worse." I mean, it all makes sense, but you can smell the bad coffee and free donuts from all of the meetings with 192 separate corporate divisions on the invite list.
It took me a while to discover the free Public IP. I ran something on the free tier for most of a year, and at some point they did some kind of internal work, and my IP address changed for the first time. I didn't care before because it stayed up and unchanged for so long.
I have to say, it put Oracle on the map as a definite option for me. Even with the Bizarro World management console.
FWIW, I have a close family member who works for Oracle and they claim that they're sincerely trying to be developer/start-up friendly in hopes to gain traction in the cloud space. I get that the default is to assume there is always a hidden agenda with Oracle, but it is possible they're trying to show some good faith here.
They aren't unique among big companies to have offered utterly opaque and punitive pricing terms, but if they hope to use the free tier to attract developers into recommending Oracle to their employers, I have a hard time imagining it will be successful given what a terrible experience older folk have had with them.
Perhaps someday, people will forget the lawnmower analogy (and the reasons behind it) and they can start fresh, I guess.
The resources are nice and they can easily run a small page or be useful to try out hosting things, deploying apps and general server maintenance/deployment/etc. However, anything you will be running on them shouldn't be essential to you. For ex, the ARM VPSes will actually switch off/get disabled at the end of the first monthly trial and I believe (feel free to correct me on this) that you will need to get some support to enable any VM you setup in the trial. Although the resource is always free, the first month is treated differently for whatever reason and you end up with a disabled VM. You can create new ones within those limits again, just fyi.
The entire platform is also unnecessarily convoluted, but I'd argue that's the case with most of these cloud providers - felt the same way trying AWS for a project and I feel the same way every day using Azure. However, out of these offerings, Oracle's is the most generous free one, just keep in mind it's just that - free. So you do get what you pay for.
I tried this, and it will worked, so I'm not really sure. I recreated the VM anyway just to be safe.
It’s a great way to get the most out of a cloud’s free tier - we help you deploy a production-quality app onto the cloud infrastructure in your own cloud account. And we add integrated cloud IDE, cloud shell, and a dashboard on top of it. Feedback welcome!
I've definitely used 4x IPv4s on an unpaid account.
>redislabs - Free 30MB redis instance
This runs on GCP btw, US east1 from what I can tell, so super low latency in that combination
