My experience was quite roller coaster with oracle, i have to mention im a student and wanted to try their free tier so i could learn more about enterprise cloud hosted VM’s and networking, signup was good for me, but when i tried selecting an arm instance it would be always out of capacity, and i mean i was on oracle from around 2022 until 2024 first half maybe?, i checked it multiple times but ARM instances would just never be avilable(i was on zurich servers, i thought about moving my account to another location-tenancy but i found out it isnt possible) so i was stuck with 2 single core epyc systems with just enough ram, it was fine to test stuff but i quickly got a big issue: networking is a mess on oracle, i mean i couldnt count how many jumps i needed to go through to actualy enable other services, it may be skill issue, but why have multiple software based firewalls? Sometimes having one software would be fine like iptables? Anyways, i was pretty fed up with not being able to do much and networking being this bad, then it come in first half 2024 an update that they forced 2FA on my account even tho i didnt wanted any of it, i logged in had to set it up and forgot to disable it back because i Dont want 2fa, i just wanna you let me manage my own security please. A month later i lost access to my phone which had the 2fa app(dont buy chinese phones, they die too early, motherboard died in it and i dont have money to recover from such state), i asked the customer support if theres some way to reset it and get back in well there is just i need to go throught some software which was legal age by now,
and navigate it with vague instructions, after 2 days of calling them and trying to do it i gave up
If you still wanna learn working with servers, networking etc. i recommend just getting your own server or choosing some other provider, NAT is not an excuse, cloudlfare tunnel helps you out,
Their cloud management and firewall situation is quite terrible. Not any better or worse than AWS or GCP or Azure, but still quite terrible.
It's actually quite neat for large deployments with thousands of containers so you don't need to manually interact with a billion firewalls by just generating all the cloud settings automatically, but for the free trial stuff you're going to need to brute force the security settings web interface until you've checked enough boxes to allow traffic on all ports.
As for the 2FA thing, IMO any cloud company like Oracle should enforce that. Companies get stuck with giant bills all the time because someone got into their cloud accounts and started spinning up crypto miners like crazy.
Jumping straight into the unnecessarily complicated world of Big Cloud seems like a challenging way to begin learning about servers, you'd probably be better off renting a small VPS somewhere instead. Or running a server in your home network, that'll also work just fine at first!
My experience was quite roller coaster with oracle, i have to mention im a student and wanted to try their free tier so i could learn more about enterprise cloud hosted VM’s and networking, signup was good for me, but when i tried selecting an arm instance it would be always out of capacity, and i mean i was on oracle from around 2022 until 2024 first half maybe?, i checked it multiple times but ARM instances would just never be avilable(i was on zurich servers, i thought about moving my account to another location-tenancy but i found out it isnt possible) so i was stuck with 2 single core epyc systems with just enough ram, it was fine to test stuff but i quickly got a big issue: networking is a mess on oracle, i mean i couldnt count how many jumps i needed to go through to actualy enable other services, it may be skill issue, but why have multiple software based firewalls? Sometimes having one software would be fine like iptables? Anyways, i was pretty fed up with not being able to do much and networking being this bad, then it come in first half 2024 an update that they forced 2FA on my account even tho i didnt wanted any of it, i logged in had to set it up and forgot to disable it back because i Dont want 2fa, i just wanna you let me manage my own security please. A month later i lost access to my phone which had the 2fa app(dont buy chinese phones, they die too early, motherboard died in it and i dont have money to recover from such state), i asked the customer support if theres some way to reset it and get back in well there is just i need to go throught some software which was legal age by now, and navigate it with vague instructions, after 2 days of calling them and trying to do it i gave up
If you still wanna learn working with servers, networking etc. i recommend just getting your own server or choosing some other provider, NAT is not an excuse, cloudlfare tunnel helps you out,