All tenancies get a set of Always Free resources in the Compute service for creating compute virtual machine (VM) instances. You must create the Always Free compute instances in your home region.

Note

If you receive an "out of host capacity" error when trying to create a Compute instance, this indicates a temporary lack of Always Free shapes in your home region. Try creating the instance in a different availability domain, or wait a while, then try to create the instance again. You can also choose to upgrade your account to Pay as You Go or another Paid account type, which gives you access to more types of Compute resources. Remember that Oracle doesn't charge for Always Free resources after you upgrade, and will only charge you for resource usage above the Always Free limits. You can use compartment quotas to control resource consumption within your account.

Available Shapes

Micro instances (AMD processor): All tenancies get up to two Always Free VM instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape, which has an AMD processor.
OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances (Arm processor): All tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month for free for VM instances using the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape, which has an Arm processor. For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory.

In regions with multiple availability domains:

You can create OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances in any availability domain, except South Korea North (Chuncheon).
Instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape can only be created in one availability domain.

Number of Compute Instances Available to Your Account

Depending on the size of the boot volume and the number of OCPUs that you allocate to each OCI Ampere A1 Compute instance, you can create one or two OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances, 2 OCPUs total. The minimum boot volume size for each instance is 47 GB, regardless of shape. Your account comes with 200 GB of Always Free block volume storage which you use to create the boot volumes for your compute instances.

For example, using the default boot volume size of 47 GB, you could provision two instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape, and one OCI Ampere A1 Compute instance with 2 OCPUs or two OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances with 1 OCPU each, and zero instances using the VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro shape. Many combinations are possible, depending on how you allocate your block storage and OCI Ampere A1 Compute OCPUs. See Details of the Always Free compute instances for more information on allocating OCPU and memory resources when creating OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances.

IP Addresses for Compute Instances

You do not have to assign a public IPv4 address to every compute instance in your tenancy. You can create a compute instance in a public subnet without assigning the instance a public IP addresses, and create an instance in a private subnet.

Idle Compute Instances

Important

Reclamation of Idle Compute Instances

Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true:

CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 20%
Network utilization is less than 20%
Memory utilization is less than 20% (applies to A1 shapes only)