OUR EXPERT
Darius Wiles has investigated the major cloud providers to see what he can get for free. Because he’s cheap.
Lets create a Linux virtual machine running in Oracle’s cloud, and it’s fine as Oracle’s paying for it! Linux Format articles often estimate the cost of a small virtual machine to be around £5 or $5 a month, but Oracle’s Always Free Tier makes it possible for you to run a few Arm-based and x86 machines for free. This isn’t a time-limited trial, so you can keep your machines running indefinitely. As general living costs continue to rise, anything that reduces your outgoings has to be a good thing.
The Always Free Tier includes x86-64 machines with one CPU core and 1GB of memory, and Arm machines (based on Ampere Altra CPUs) with up to four physical cores and 24GB of memory. You can choose either, but this tutorial assumes that you opt for Arm.
By the end of the tutorial you’ll have a virtual machine running a public web server and know how to expose other software to the internet. This tutorial only discusses the steps essential to reaching our goal, and ignores the numerous other cloud services and options that are available. Space limitations means that this isn’t a general guide to the cloud and how to get the most from it (see LXF281 to LXF293 for that!)
You need to be comfortable with writing and implementing code from the Linux command line, but no other knowledge of virtualisation or clouds is required. You’ll need to sign up for an Oracle Cloud account, which requires you to supply
