Introduction​

Hello everyone!

My name is Anthony Pillot. You may have met me during a performance audit or prestigious training courses given to numerous clients.

After this more than truthful presentation, I would like to get back to some more serious topics.

I am a developer. Sometimes I get bored in the evening. With this damn virus (COVID), even more.

Use case​

So I develop personal projects, sometimes. And in these (too) rare cases, I create a nice docker-compose with what I need to develop.

My POC is gaining momentum, and I would like to potentially present it to others. Or at least stop allocating 6 gigabytes of my machine for Docker resources.

So I would like to have a functional, performant, prod-ready (or at least, prep-ready), secure, and if possible, with modern technologies infrastructure. But I don't have any more money, my entire budget is allocated to the purchase of a Mustang GT.

Bare metal is fun, but it's never enough, finally if it's not spending more than €20 per month at OVH, for several VPS at OVH.

Which is more or less equivalent to what will follow in terms of performance, and all for free.

Contextualization of different Public Cloud providers​

Of course, there are Public Cloud providers that you all know, who also offer free resources.

GCP for example, offers some free resources but, if you have the misfortune to use a resource that is not included in these resources, you will pay. And no one will warn you if you use a resource that is not in the free resources. I paid the price for it. Not to mention that free resources are extremely limited (an e2-micro with 2 vCPUs and 1 GB of RAM, thanks a lot dude). Obviously, we forget all about GKE and others, which are absolutely not included in this Free Tier.

And that's where I found Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, through our wonderful Slack which is an endless source of information, by the way. And more specifically thanks to my colleague, who gave me the desire to take a closer look at this offer.

Presentation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure​

And so, in October 2016, Oracle, this wonderful company, appreciated by all IT players, released Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

A Public Cloud provider service that aims to compete with other GCP, Azure, AWS, to name a few.

To attract developers to their new platform, Oracle offers a free tier called Always Free Resources, like many other public cloud services. But this one is a bit more generous than others, and as the name of the offer suggests, these resources are free for life, subject to change from Oracle.

(Note: When signing up for OCI, you must provide your credit card information to prevent people from creating too many servers for free, installing a Cloud Computing tool like OpenStack, creating your own Public Cloud, and competing with Google!)

OCI Always Free Resources​

The resources included in OCI's Always Free tier are:

• Two small AMD VMs, each with 1 OCPU core, 1 GB memory, and 0.48 Gbps bandwidth.
• And most importantly, an ARM VM with 4 OCPU cores, 24 GB memory, and 4 Gbps bandwidth; it can be divided into 4 small VMs with 1 OCPU core, 4 GB memory, and 1 Gbps bandwidth this time.
• 200 GB Block Volumes Storage, which are storage locations that can be attached to any VM.
• Two managed databases of 20 GB each.
• Global bandwidth limit at OCI: 10 TB per month.
• And a bunch of other services and resources that are apparently free for life.

Demo!

Note for the demo.

Going Further

If you're interested in this presentation and would like to learn more, we can talk about other features to add to our brand new little cluster:

• Install cert-manager for automatic SSL certificate generation.
• Install Kubernetes Ingress for application routing and load balancing.
• Set up your domain name, DNS, for application routing (e.g. *.my-domain.com; elastic.my-domain.com, data.my-domain.com, etc.).