[HN Gopher] Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances
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Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances
Author : Naac
Score : 137 points
Date : 2021-12-10 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.servethehome.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.servethehome.com)
| SimianSci wrote:
| Enticing, but a part of me is still very hesitant to get in bed
| with Oracle. They've gained a reputation of trying to lock
| customers in so that their legal department can "innovate" more
| ways of squeezing money out of them. The common joke remains that
| Oracle is actually just two law-firms in a software-company
| trenchcoat.
|
| Until this reputation changes, any offer they present smells
| suspiciously like a baited hook.
| _jal wrote:
| Never invite a vampire into your home is timeless advice.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Had IBM Cloud account for a while. At some point, they started
| to attach a notice to a monthly $0 bill along the lines: if you
| card gets declined, we will fine you $25 and if you don't pay
| in 7 days, we will fine you further $50. Easiest account
| termination decision I have ever had. I guess the first email
| from Oracle "we are making routine changes to the T&Cs and our
| privacy policy" will be the end of my account.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Is this even legal? In most jurisdictions, you have to be a
| government to fine anybody.
|
| Sending frivolous charges may be considered fraud and also
| lead to chargebacks.
| evandwight wrote:
| It's not a government fine. It's just an agreement in the
| contract specifying a payment is due if your card declines.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I'm not sure that is legal either. You can charge for
| some product or service but, unless you are a licensed
| bank, you can't lend out money and charge for overdraft,
| which is basically something they're doing here.
|
| And even a bank can only do it against accounts open in
| that bank.
| evandwight wrote:
| You may be right. It looks like some states have specific
| rules for credit cards. For example, in some states
| businesses can't charge credit card processing fees.
|
| However, many businesses charge late payment fees.
|
| https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/can-
| merchant-ch...
| jfrunyon wrote:
| There's no lending of money involved? If your card gets
| declined, they add a fee to your bill. You can either
| choose to not pay it (and stop receiving any services
| from that company, and possibly have your account sent to
| collections or even be sued since you agreed to pay
| something and then didn't pay it), or you can pay it.
| worik wrote:
| IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a
| service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the
| service.
|
| If I make up charges for you and you refuse to pay, I can
| cease offering the service (to everybody) but I cannot
| just cut you out because you will not pay the out of
| contract charge.
|
| These laws are to protect people who belong to groups
| that commonly get discriminated against.
| niij wrote:
| > IANAL
|
| That much is clear.
|
| Charging a fee for providing bad payment info is legal.
| See "bounced check" fees.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| If someone has contractually agreed to pay a certain amount
| if an event happens, and that event happens, then yes, that
| person has to pay that amount if that event happens.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It does not work that way when selling services or goods
| to a person. In most jurisdictions, anyway.
|
| It is highly regulated and it should be so.
|
| You can only charge for things that you have delivered
| and only the ones which were requested/consumed.
| smarx007 wrote:
| In Europe, we don't use chargebacks in most cases. Unless
| the payment was truly fraudulent (i.e. you cannot get hold
| of someone who issued the payment or they are not in
| business of doing things they charged for), you have to use
| proper legal means of settling the dispute. As you may
| imagine, the life is too short for things of such kind,
| especially with multi-billion corps. Anyway, dug up the
| email:
|
| Please note that all payments are due in full on the
| monthly anniversary date. Failure to remit payment for
| services on the monthly anniversary date will result in a
| $20 late fee. If full payment has not been received within
| five (5) consecutive days, including the anniversary date,
| termination of public access to Customer services and a $50
| reconnect fee will be incurred. Failure to remit payment
| for services within seven (7) consecutive days, including
| the anniversary date, shall result in termination of access
| to the service network and all services shall be reclaimed.
|
| And the T&Cs link: https://www.ibm.com/support/customer/cso
| l/terms?id=Z126-6304... To my pleasant surprise, the T&Cs
| are quite a readable document. As you see, they call them
| fees, not fines.
|
| The https://www.ibm.com/cloud/pricing page also says they
| offer loans, leasing, and other kinds of financing.
| thriftwy wrote:
| I always thought that chargeback was the rule of Visa and
| MasterCard networks, so if you used that for the
| transaction, you are eligible for it. I wonder what's the
| extent of my confusion here.
|
| It is also a proper legal procedure.
| smarx007 wrote:
| You are right, even the consumer protection agency says
| as much: https://www.hallakonsument.se/en/articles/card-
| complaints/
|
| However, I think now I have a better idea why: debit
| cards have a major share in Europe and the page above
| says "When you pay with a debit card, you have no right
| by law to turn to the bank to demand a refund."
|
| But thanks for a reminder, and I will think about using a
| credit card for online purchases in some cases rather
| than a debit.
| bserge wrote:
| You don't _have_ to use "proper legal means". Which are
| rigged against you anyway.
|
| Use secondary bank accounts and cards. IBM loses a
| thousand yoyos, no one even farts. You do, it's a major
| loss.
|
| Unless you're rich _and_ somewhat of an idiot, of course.
| It 's really hard to get rich playing by the rules.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > You can only charge for things that you have delivered
| and only the ones which were requested/consumed.
|
| This was requested. By you requesting a product or service
| which included this as its terms. Same for delivered and
| consumed.
| worik wrote:
| Not in civilised jurisdictions.
|
| Plain language and clear notification is necessary. Just
| "included in the terms" is not enough.
|
| But and body can ask anybody for almost anything and if
| it is provided then no illegality.
|
| Send money now: Acc: 1927-3938277-00
|
| You all owe me US$100 for reading this. Pay now!
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Sure, but Oracle can probably send it to collections and at
| the very least waste your time getting things fixed at the
| credit reporting agencies. At most, they'll sell your
| "debt" to one of those lowlife collections agencies that
| keeps calling until they get through to family members and
| then makes veiled threats. It's not legal, but with an
| unlimited supply of overseas "agents" that isn't really
| their problem, and it most certainly isn't Oracle's
| problem.
| Tomte wrote:
| You can install Debian (and other distributions) by downloading
| the netboot.xyz EFI boot image, then open a "cloud connection",
| reboot the instance, press ESC, and then boot from file.
| [deleted]
| chomp wrote:
| I played around with Oracles free tier. When you first sign up,
| you must choose a "home" region. You cannot add another region on
| the free plan.
|
| These awesome free instances are very limited stock. You have no
| way of knowing if the region you choose has stock of the desired
| instances before you select the region. You may not change your
| "home" region.
|
| You will get sales phone calls. Caveat emptor.
| mihcsab wrote:
| If you wait a bit, you can get what you want to try.
| smarx007 wrote:
| You can change the zone within the region. There were no free
| Ampere instances in the Frankfurt AZ1, I found them in AZ2.
| Though it only works for the Ampere. 1vCPU x86 VM can only be
| spun up in AZ1.
| chomp wrote:
| Gotcha. I had signed up in a US region and there was nary an
| ARM server to be found. I was quite disappointed. Then sales
| people reminded me of my disappointment weeks after.
| alx__ wrote:
| So when i sign up I should the phone number of my nemesis?
| Noted.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I typically use some number I find on the company's website,
| like: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/ Same for web
| feedback forms where I don't want follow-up questions,
| sales@domain.biz.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| They verify the number in the sign up process.
| duxup wrote:
| Until your nemesis says "Yeah upgrade my account for all that
| cool stuff!"
| smegsicle wrote:
| that's when things really start heating up between my
| nemesis and my other nemesis (and people talk about the
| equifax leak like it's a bad thing!)
| FastEatSlow wrote:
| I've been using it for a year for one of their Ampere instances
| and haven't received any phone calls. Might be because I'm in
| the UK (region UK South (London)), I imagine they're much more
| call happy in countries where the laws are looser.
| chc4 wrote:
| Yeah, I signed up specifically to try out the Ampere instances
| (and when chosing the home region it said x, y, z were at
| capacity so I chose w), but wasn't able to actually create an
| Ampere instance because of lack of availability. I ended up
| just using a free x86 instance for a different project, but it
| was pretty disappointing.
| marderfarker2 wrote:
| Do they provide free IPv4 for the x86 instances?
| chc4 wrote:
| Yes
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| at the end of the day its Oracle... Bite me once, shame on you;
| bite me twice.. shame on me. I dont know one person who has not
| got an oracle hate story. As long as Larry has his billion $
| yacht, the clientelle cant go to hell!
| sgt wrote:
| Can you run a small business on this, indefinitey, for free?
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Indefinitely? Mmmmmmm probably not. This is clearly a loss-
| leader for them to draw in more customers, so you can't
| guarantee it won't change
| nefitty wrote:
| This might be the first Oracle product I use. That means down
| the line I might have an informed opinion to share in
| business decisions where Oracle provides a solution. Pretty
| smart.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Or they are just totally failing in the cloud and this is
| an indication of that.
|
| Also not hard to imagine the whole cloud getting shut down
| and/or sold to Salesforce (and shut down)
| hamburglar wrote:
| They're definitely not doing well in the "casual cloud
| user" space, which hurts them because nobody is familiar
| with their console and APIs. Everyone knows how to do
| stuff on AWS because we've all done personal throwaway
| projects there. Somewhere else in this thread someone
| posted their notes on the confusing console, and reading
| through it, it doesn't look any more complicated than AWS
| to me, but familiarity is valuable. Maybe this is a play
| for that type of usage.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
| Think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawn mower"
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That's not a great comparison. Lawnmower salesmen don't
| actively try to persuade you to stick your hand into the
| moving blades.
| mintplant wrote:
| Ellison isn't the salesman, he's the lawnmower.
| hermitdev wrote:
| And don't assume you're the operator of said lawnmower.
| You are, in fact, the grass.
| exhilaration wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with this quote, this is the source:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
| GordonS wrote:
| There's absolutely no way Oracle will continue giving this away
| free indefinitely. With the rush they're likely to get just
| from this being on HN, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least
| temporarily disabled because of over-subscription.
|
| As an aside, I've looked at Oracle Cloud before, and pricing
| definitely seems favourable compared to the big 3, and IIRC
| they even include a good chunk of bandwidth for free. But... I
| just don't trust Oracle. Now, it might well be that Oracle
| Cloud is completely separate from the rest of Oracle, in which
| case I might be more tempted - anyone here work at Oracle Cloud
| and can share, even with a throwaway if you're too embarrassed
| to admit to it? :P
| eatonphil wrote:
| I worked for an adtech business unit at Oracle until recently
| (my choice to leave). It's a massive organization of over
| 100,000 employees (not to mention contractors AFAIK). Every
| business unit is run kinda like separate companies with their
| own cultures and practices and whatnot.
|
| There are better and worse orgs and managers as you would
| expect of a company of that size.
|
| As far as I can tell there was literally no specific "Oracle"
| culture. Some of the well-known cultures attributed to
| "Oracle" may be true of specific business units like Oracle
| database or ERP but it's hard to say without having been in
| every one of those business units. But my adtech business
| unit was nothing like the nightmare/FUD stories you hear
| online.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's free because no one would choose them over AWS, GCP, etc
| if it cost anything. The second they think they no longer have
| to dangle free things in front of developers in order to get
| their business, it will no longer be free.
| voz_ wrote:
| I'd rather pay more at every possible instance than interact with
| Oracle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
| freemint wrote:
| During the last ARM HPC User Group conf i was able to get my
| hands a 160 core instance, i was shocked, holy moly do they beat
| Xeon when it comes to SAT solving in my test with HordeSAT.
| hvgk wrote:
| Your kidneys are probably mentioned in the small print.
| graton wrote:
| 1) The article is from May 2021
|
| 2) When I checked today the free Ampere instance was a 1 core,
| 6GB of memory, 1 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 2 virtual
| NICs.
|
| Edit: I spoke too soon. After selecting it I was able to increase
| the CPU count to 4 and 24GB of memory. I provisioned with Ubuntu
| 20.04, logged in and I see 4 CPUs and 24GB of memory. Cool.
|
| The free x86 instance is 1 core, 1GB of memory, 0.48 Gbps network
| bandwidth, and up to 1 virtual NIC.
| treesknees wrote:
| Everyone here is dogging on Oracle, and they are justified
| probably, however I've been a user of the free tier for going on
| 7 months now. I run a few projects on an AMD instance and an
| Ampere instance, both fall under the Always Free tier (Ampere
| isn't "always free" but as part of Always Free, Oracle basically
| credits your account to the equivalent of 4xCPU and 24GB of RAM
| every 31 days.) I've never been charged anything, I don't even
| have a credit card on file for them to charge.
|
| I will say that the documentation around their services is much
| worse than AWS. I oftentimes struggle to figure out where to
| configure things or which services to use. Other than that, it's
| been fine. If you're really looking for a free VM, I would say
| check it out.
|
| One piece of advice I'd give is look at regions outside of the
| US. I selected their Toronto region and I've had zero issues
| provisioning new instances, whereas most people having trouble
| provisioning free-tier instances are in the more popular US
| regions.
|
| Don't run your critical business apps on it. But perfectly usable
| for personal projects and learning the cloud without spending
| money.
|
| Edit: Just to add, running a speedtest from my Toronto A1
| instance to Los Angeles California
|
| Download: 374.64 Mbit/s Upload: 192.95 Mbit/s
| souldragon wrote:
| So I been using the service for a couple months now, and I been
| accumulating charges on my free account related to "Block Volume
| - Performance Units", which is small 0.03+ charges added to
| default "Balanced Setting" free disk volume each month, and 0.03
| a day is smallest amount it accumulates, when hosting stuff on
| there I accumulated 0.55 cents.
|
| So if you want truly free, you need to select "Lower Cost" by
| placing the slider down to 0 VPU.
|
| Still I feel like it's a matter time with all these hidden not so
| free nobs until I get slammed with big cloud bills.
|
| Side note, can't delete my Tenancy (get an error) or my
| Account(waiting for something from support).
|
| Edit* $0.55 for this month, supposedly I owe $10.56 this year for
| these VPU's, but I am free tier so not sure how this is going
| work?
| notreallyserio wrote:
| All,
|
| How does the performance on these compare to similar VMs at other
| clouds? Anyone here on HN published benchmarks?
|
| Thanks in advance, Barry Elisson
| PaulHoule wrote:
| https://www.shortform.com/blog/48-laws-of-power-law-40-despi...
| Saris wrote:
| If you use this make sure you sign up with a CC number that's
| limited to a few dollars.
|
| Also getting an instance is tough, they're in short supply.
| [deleted]
| noasaservice wrote:
| The only valid response to this is "Fuck Oracle".
|
| Friends do not let friends use anything relating to Oracle,
| VirtualBox, Java... Anything. No. Just no. Run, Don't walk.
| hamburglar wrote:
| > Java
|
| Uh, whaaaat? I am a legit Java hater, but "friends don't let
| friends use Java" is kinda a bizarre viewpoint. You know how
| much of our industry uses Java? I may prefer other languages
| but I'm not turning down a job based on them having settled on
| Java. It's not PHP. :D
| dijit wrote:
| Be extremely wary of Oracle free tiers.
|
| They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose
| the smallest of the two "shapes" but it was apparently not free.
| This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was
| extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed
| the instance.
|
| This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the
| next month. They charged me until my card expired- then they
| finally cancelled the account and I paid the last bill manually.
| They then added another 0.1SEK charge (which is not payable, as
| 1SEK is the lowest denomination of currency).
|
| I still get extremely high quantities of A4 paper through the
| mail box, at one point it was 29 pages of the same invoice.
|
| I could have done something wrong here, but there is a distinct
| dark pattern on sign up and there are definitely bugs in the
| billing system.
|
| Caveat Emptor.
|
| EDIT: in case someone thinks I am joking. This was one of the
| packs: https://imgur.com/0fbsR3E
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| What is shape? Reading the doc doesn't make it clear why it is
| a paid thing. I just signed up for oracle cloud for free
| account and how to check if I accidentally bought anything?
| dijit wrote:
| Shape just means instance sizing.
|
| I was presented two options:
|
| 1: 1vCPU 2GiB ram
|
| 2: 2vCPU 8GiB ram
|
| (Or something, my memory is awful and it was a long time ago
| now. I remember a friend of mine who works at oracle was
| walking me through.)
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Oh. So can't you delete the VM after being charged once?
| hereforphone wrote:
| Be extremely wary of Oracle anything IMO
| social_quotient wrote:
| Similar problem to me when they acquired apiary. I was in a
| free tier of apiary which became a paid tier under oracle. They
| then charged me for months. I finally had to write a letter
| (yes snail mail) stating that we were going to report them for
| deceptive trade practices to the attorney general of Texas.
| They got back to me after a few weeks. They promised a
| refund...never got that and it's just not worth fighting.
|
| I will never choose to do business with oracle directly.
| walrus01 wrote:
| It's almost as if now that SCO is fully defunct, they are
| _trying really hard_ to take the crown of most litigious and
| absurd *nix related software company in the USA.
| eitland wrote:
| I worked for a company that brought Oracle customers.
|
| Didn't prevent them from trying to extort us too.
| shoo wrote:
| if they only print on one side of the A4 paper you may never
| need to buy paper for rough notes again
| schmorptron wrote:
| whenever you sign up for some one-time use trash, use
| support@oracle.com as your email to get them back :)
| michael1999 wrote:
| We were a paying customer, and the same thing happened. I
| expect it was lack of competence more than dark patterns,
| although strategic incompetence is always possible with O.
| Oracle is not a credible cloud vendor.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| Obligatory Bryan Cantrill rant on Oracle:
| https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Oh my god, lmao
| jaytaylor wrote:
| I've been using it for about 3 years without issue, but you're
| right - you do have to be careful to set it up properly. I've
| also never gotten any related (or unrelated) physical mail from
| them about my account.
| bserge wrote:
| Use a virtual card for everything, block it if you don't like
| something.
| worik wrote:
| What do you mean "virtual card"?
| walrus01 wrote:
| I have mentally trained myself so that whenever I see the name
| "Oracle", related to any new product, I think "Larry Ellison
| needs a bigger yacht".
| rozap wrote:
| Oh my god. Oracle having my address and credit card number is a
| nightmare scenario.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I wonder what happens if you sign up with a fake name, semi-
| disposable email address and a prepaid visa gift card that
| has $3.50 remaining balance on it.
| john2010 wrote:
| accounts get cancelled after a few weeks!
| eitland wrote:
| Some might think this is a joke, but the IT manager at one
| place I worked was almost fooled into thinking he had to pay
| licenses for our MariaDB databases running on AWS after
| Oracle had got his name from a web form.
|
| This is a different company than the other one I mentioned
| elsewhere where we resold Oracle and they still tried to
| extort _us_.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Man this is exactly the kind of dystopian bullshit I would
| expect from Oracle.
| hereforphone wrote:
| They ruin everything they touch IMO (Java came to them ruined
| already to be fair)
| kaba0 wrote:
| And they do an excellent job as Java's language steward.
| Java was revived and has many excellent research and
| development going for it. Project Loom, Panama, Valhalla
| came to mind. They also made a low-latency GC.
|
| Oracle is not a homogeneous entity.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Sorry, Java is outdated, young people aren't even
| interested in learning Java anymore. It's the "old
| language".
|
| Try React. Angular. Anything NPM is sexy. Leave Java for
| the generation Y.
| [deleted]
| hereforphone wrote:
| Java is disgusting. So is all the stuff you just
| mentioned.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I tried writing my last project in React but its
| Postgresql libraries are basically non-existent.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I have seen hell, and it is node-modules.
| worik wrote:
| NPM has less reason to exist than Java
|
| React and Angular are out of date already, surely, being
| JS frameworks?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Except while building the language into a nicer language,
| they also took the time and effort to rebuild the
| licenses around it so that it is harder to feel safe
| using it
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > rebuild the licenses around it
|
| Isn't it all GPL?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are not
| (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to
| release under multiple different licenses) and they use
| Oracle's predatory "free" licensing - you cand download
| and run for free for 6 months, but you owe them money if
| you keep running those binaries after the moment the new
| version is released. There is no explicit enforcement
| mechanism - it's up to you to be careful, otherwise their
| lawyers will notice at some point and bill you for all
| the times you weren't.
| Spinfusor wrote:
| Oracle's OpenJDK binaries are GPL; the Oracle JDK has a
| better license as of a few months ago (v17):
| https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-
| infrastructure/post/introduci...
| AQuantized wrote:
| So it can be avoided by compiling the code yourself?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The code is GPL, but the official Oracle binaries are
| not (since Oracle owns the copyright, they are free to
| release under multiple different licenses) and they use
| Oracle's predatory "free" licensing...
|
| And once they started doing that, everyone switched to
| some flavor of OpenJDK, many distributions of which are
| backed by organizations of at least Oracle's size.
|
| https://adoptopenjdk.net/
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/
|
| https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/overview
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/openjdk
| chrisseaton wrote:
| So build it yourself or get someone else to build it for
| you.
| coldpie wrote:
| Did you miss the part where they tried to burn the entire
| computing industry to the ground so they could get a few
| bucks out of Google? I wouldn't touch anything related to
| Oracle with a fifty foot pole, that shit is radioactive.
| MayeulC wrote:
| That might be due to
| https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts (I know
| it's a joke and the drawing is getting old, but it still
| rings somewhat true).
| wyager wrote:
| > Java was revived
|
| Java probably should have had a DNR on file.
| papreclip wrote:
| I had the same experience with AWS ec2 free tier that ran out
| after a year and started billing me. They bill me $17/mo now
| even though the machine was shut down and AWS account was
| closed 2 months ago
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Was the machine shut down, or was the instance deleted?
| [deleted]
| chaoticmass wrote:
| This is SOP for Oracle. Company I work for got stung by them to
| the tune of a couple hundred thousand dollars over a similar
| deal with Oracle DB licensing. I wouldn't enter into any kind
| of contract or license with Oracle at all, and if I had to, I'd
| hire a specialized consultant and a lawyer to go through
| everything with a fine tooth comb first.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Goodness, for those who don't know, 1 USD ~ 10 SEK. They
| printed a page to charge someone 10 ore or 1C/. Maybe I don't
| need that free account after all.
| pt_PT_guy wrote:
| even in US I only see 1vcore, 6gb ram option.
| bborud wrote:
| With Oracle you always read the fine print. I wouldn't risk
| touching this with _your_ ten foot pole.
| hermitdev wrote:
| Free, you say? Oracle, you say? No, no, the price is too high.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| It's hard to build yachts by giving away free machines.
| bborud wrote:
| There is more money in treating customers even just slightly
| better.
| worik wrote:
| "He gives the kids free samples because he knows full
| well that today's young, innocent faces will
| be tomorrow's clientele"
| gajus wrote:
| If you are a startup and using Oracle, then your are NGMI
|
| Use common sense
| 1_player wrote:
| "Not Going To Make It", for people who are not into the
| latest trendy acronyms.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Thanks. I'd expanded it to "Not Getting My Investment",
| which might also be fitting.
| gaze wrote:
| In the words of Michael Lewis, "I appreciate this, but I just
| want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?"
| nvaoz wrote:
| If you want desperate salesmen calling and emailing you every day
| for months, this is your best option!
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Been using it for months for a Minecraft server. Runs 10+ players
| with mods without much difficulty. I limited the RAM usage to 6GB
| though so that the Garbage Collector doesn't go nuts.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Uuuh, good idea!
| andai wrote:
| Wait, are you saying Java performs _worse_ if you give it more
| memory to work with?
| dijit wrote:
| It can.
|
| GC pauses cause stuttering. More memory is a longer GC pause.
|
| This is only the case if you allocate and deallocate a lot.
|
| Also: never go larger than 32GiB on heap else you'll end up
| with 64bit inter pointers: that will seriously degrade
| performance.
| sulam wrote:
| This very much depends on the GC you're using. But yes, a
| full GC will take longer the more memory you have. Therefore
| you want to avoid full GCs like the plague.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| No. More accurately: with very large heaps the default
| performance characteristics of the GC might be different than
| what you'd like it to be. For example you might get huge
| throughput but occasional long GC pauses.
|
| But it's all tunable.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Of course, nobody really likes Oracle. But it is pretty cool and
| impressive that Ampere is able to trade blows favorably with
| something the size of Amazon.
| _red wrote:
| Can't even sign up. Gives generic error about "payment /
| registration failed" - its a regular credit card that I use
| everywhere. Oh well...kinda glad to be honest.
|
| Knowing Oracle it will eventually become a nightmare anyway
| (whoops, we accidentally billed you $70 for the free-tier, but
| you need to manually call this long-distance number between the
| hours of 9am-4pm to reverse the charge and this also happens to
| be our sales dept)
| slig wrote:
| Had this exactly error couple of weeks ago. Tried multiple good
| CC and it never worked. Blessing in disguise.
| quiffledwerg wrote:
| The large print giveth.
|
| The small print taketh away.
| hi_hello wrote:
| Thus is the way of the Oracle
| sgt wrote:
| I love how HN is extremely skeptical towards Oracle.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Lest folks not read the actual article, STH is pretty happy about
| this offering:
|
| > To us, this is a big deal. This is perhaps one of the best
| "free" instances that one can get. Something that we really like
| about Oracle's Always Free tier is that one can use it without
| being as worried about overages as with Amazon's offering. AWS
| has a size advantage, but Oracle has a great Always Free Tier
| offering.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I don't notice anything in the STH article about the license
| terms. (Sorry if I'm just missing it.)
|
| Given Oracle's reputation, no evaluation is complete without a
| thorough examination of those terms, ideally by a competent
| lawyer.
| mihcsab wrote:
| You have to manually upgrade your account to get charged.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| I bet you don't need to upgrade your account to receive
| nastygrams from Oracle legal, though.
| amock wrote:
| I've had an account for a couple of years and I might
| have received a survey email once, but otherwise I have
| received only things like notifications about
| infrastructure changes and there haven't been many of
| those.
| westpfelia wrote:
| If you are running a business sure. But personally I just
| would like a beefy cloud instance to run some things off of
| for personal use.
|
| Kinda perfect for that.
| svdr wrote:
| The offer is here: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
| NmAmDa wrote:
| After the trial ends, your ARM instance will get deleted and you
| will be back to free tier offer. You can use 300$ to try with.
|
| You have to upgrade to paying accounr manually so you are not
| going to have surprise bill if you stick to free tier always and
| never upgrades.
|
| But good luck finding arm instance in your home zone because the
| demand is very high so you have to keep trying from time to time.
|
| There are some people using scripts to automate the instance
| availability and registration so they can catch the opportunity.
| pikdum wrote:
| After it's deleted, you can spin it back up again and it'll
| keep running. Think you can even reuse the same boot volume,
| but I set mine up again from scratch. Not sure why they delete
| it in the first place though, maybe due to capacity issues?
| Taywee wrote:
| "Oracle" and "free" in the same sentence raises alarms. I've seen
| many years of Oracle filling their "free" offerings with horrible
| trap doors into massive amounts of financial obligation that are
| way too easy to accidentally fall through.
| Tomte wrote:
| I find the Oracle dashboard very confusing.
|
| My notes: https://www.2uo.de/Computing/setting-up-a-free-server-
| in-ora...
|
| Also this: https://www.2uo.de/Computing/firewall-in-oracle-cloud/
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Nice. I assumed cryptocurrency fraudsters would stop these kinds
| of offerings for the near future.
| chc4 wrote:
| You have to provide a valid credit card in order to sign up for
| the free account, which probably helps stymie abuse.
| MightyOwl13 wrote:
| Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.
|
| On a side note I do use their free tier stuff (the amd vps-es) to
| host my website and it's been fine. Used the ampere instance to
| transfer stuff between two rclone encrypted remotes and haven't
| had issues so far.
|
| Be careful though, the ampere instances aren't treated as "always
| free" so after the trial period ends, they get suspended and you
| either have to contact them or delete the instances and set them
| up from scratch... Had to spend a few hours setting up a book
| stack app instance again.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's a trap send no reply.
| artembugara wrote:
| Oracle for Startups gives 70% off for 2 years:
|
| https://www.oracle.com/startup/explore-the-program/
| phs318u wrote:
| There is no reasonable question for which "Oracle" is a good
| answer. The brand "Oracle" has rapidly evolved into a signal of
| "badness" in the same way as white mould on fruit, or chromatic
| slime on meat. Stay away!
| m4xm4n wrote:
| nice try Oracle!
| Tepix wrote:
| That's a sweet deal. How much is 100GB extra disk space per
| month?
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| 2.55 dollars/month for an extra 100GB -- you get 200GB free but
| they are hard to come buy because of where they are located. I
| ended up getting the entire free tier as expected, except for
| the storage which wasn't available in the region I selected.
|
| I'm _very_ happy with the setup, and here's a silly github
| workflow to deploy to oracle cloud:
| https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/oracle_actions
| Const-me wrote:
| Block storage is $0.0425 / GB / month with "balanced" I/O
| performance level whatever that means, file storage is $0.30 /
| GB / month.
|
| Block volumes are attached to a specific virtual machine which
| views that thing as a local disk.
|
| File storage is deployed on the virtual network, that thing is
| visible to all VMs in the network as an NFS server.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I signed a few months ago and overall the experience have been
| positive. Initially there was an issue with the availability of
| the A1 instances (Switzerland North) but after a few trials I
| managed to grab one. You also get some free credit to spend
| during the first month ($300 I believe) so I was running with 32
| vCPUs, 128GB ram, and 32Gbps network. I have now downscaled to
| the free tier.
|
| I was a bit disappointed with the selection of operating systems
| but fortunately you can upload your own image (QCOW2) and create
| an instance from it (I'm running Alpine now). You can even upload
| your VMs directly from VirtualBox but I haven't tried that (right
| click -> Export to OCI).
|
| Getting IPv6 working was a bit of a hassle because it's not
| enabled by default and you need to make changes in multiple
| places [0] but it works fine now. There's a good enough Cost
| Analysis section where you can see your current usage broken down
| to days and you can create alerts based on that. Overall I find
| the Administration Console to be more pleasant than Amazon's but
| still miles behind Scaleway's.
|
| [0] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-
| infrastructure/post/ipv6-on-o...
| renewiltord wrote:
| How will any of these be available? If they're free and
| unrestricted, people will squat them and never give them up. Why
| would you ever give up any of these? And if you don't need
| payment details, you can just make multiple accounts to squat
| them.
| Jansen312 wrote:
| If AWS can pull the plugs on paying customer earlier this year
| due to political reasons, why wouldn't Larry do so to free
| tiers for business reasons. Those squatters will get evicted
| easily just like any squatters in America. Since they have very
| limited means to engage lawyers, every courts in America will
| hand Larry a hall pass easily. As many have said, you just
| simply don't invite vampires in no matter how voluptuous and
| scantily-dressed or muscular Tom-Cruise-handsome.
| marcodiego wrote:
| "Instances". I thought they're getting rid of surplus.
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