📅 2026-Jan-12 ⬩ ✍️ Ashwin Nanjappa ⬩ 🏷️ cloud ⬩ 📚 Archive

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is one of the largest Cloud Service Providers (CSP) of the world. It offers a Free Tier that is great for home users who have minimal need of a cloud instance. The rest of the information on this page is based on my experience with the Free Tier.

Create an account

From the Free Tier page, follow the online direction to create a new account. You will be required to provide details of a valid credit card, but it will not be charged. You will need to associate an email address, but also create an account name.

Note that the account creation was not immediate, it took a day and I could verify my login worked only after a day.

Create an instance

An instance is the first step to get access to a compute node where we can install and run software.

From top-left menu, go to Compute -> Instances and choose Create instance.

In Placement, I let it pick the default that was pamH:US-SANJOSE-1-AD-1.

In Image, I chose Canonical Ubuntu 24.04. I noticed that both Oracle Linux and Canoncial Ubuntu images were all listed as Free.

In Shape, I let it pick the default VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro since that was the only one marked as Always Free-eligible. This came with a 1-core CPU, 1 GB memory and 0.48 Gbps network bandwidth.

In Networking section, under Primary VNIC I used the default options of Select existing virtual cloud network and Select existing subnet. Since we need a public IP address to SSH to, I enabled the Automatically assign public IPv4 address option. In the Add SSH keys section, I pasted my public SSH key.

The instance creation took 5 minutes and the instance was listed as Running. Note the username (default was ubuntu in my case) and the public IP address.

Note: The first instance I created did not have the public IP option enabled for choosing. I messed with the firewall (see below), deleted this instance, created a new instance and it had the public IP option. Go figure!

Configure the firewall

All incoming web traffic is blocked by default. To enable incoming traffic at certain ports, we must open them in the OCI firewall.

From top-left menu, go to Networking -> Virtual cloud networks.

From the list, choose your VCN and go to its Security -> Security Lists section.

Click on the Default Security List -> Security rules.

Click on Add Ingress Rules and provide Source CIDR as 0.0.0.0/0, IP protocol as TCP, Destination ports as 80,443 (or the ports required by your web application) and allow both HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

SSS to the instance

To SSH to the public IP address of the instance:

$ ssh -i <path-to-private-key> ubuntu@<public-ip>

You can now work in this compute instance by installing Ubuntu packages, install Docker images and work as if at a local Ubuntu computer.

Access web application

To run a web application, install it and then access it through the browser at the address http://<public-ip>/. If there a API exposed by the app, then http://<public-ip>/<api-path>.