Oracle Free Tier Issues Solved: Out of Capacity & Idle Stops

today let's look at the two most common issues that people face when using oracle's free tier particularly when you're trying to get those four CPUs and 24 gigabytes of RAM now oracle's free T has become very popular and it's been very difficult now to actually get access to these virtual machines so you'll often get that out of capacity error so I'm talking about when you try to create an instance with ampere processors and you get that out of capacity for shape VM standard A1 Flex I'll show you how to work around this one and the other really common issue people run into is this one where you get an email called Oracle Cloud infrastructure compute resource maintenance and they are talking about reclaiming idle resources so if you've created this big server and you're not really using it you may get this email and they may actually stop your instance if you haven't used it enough so you'll have to actually go in and restart your instance whenever they do this to you but I'll show you some workarounds to avoid this happening to you as well what I mean is people sometimes get an email like this um the idle instances will be stopped seven days from now if this happens to you I'll show you a workaround for this anyway let's just start with the out of capacity error so you can actually use a script to keep retrying until you succeed or you can actually just upgrade your account to a pay-as-you-go account and only use those free tier resources so you never need to pay so either of these ways will be able to get around that out of capacity error let's talk about the first one using a script to retry so over on medium there is a tutorial by Alexander hitrov I'll link to that in the description and that'll actually just run a script that retries every five minutes or so to generate a instance on oracle's free tier until it works so that takes most people have reported a few days they've managed to generate an instance using this the script is actually hosted over on GitHub I'll link that as well and for those of you who like video tutorials you've actually published a really nice little video tutorial to go along with this as well so I'll link all of those below if you want to try this method out the other method is to upgrade to a pay-as-you-go account and and only just use those free tier resources so you never actually need to pay because pay as you go accounts actually have priority and you'll be able to create those Empire instances much more easily if you upgrade your account I'll show you what I mean so if you're using a free tier account you'll have this purple Banner at the top here and if you want to upgrade you can use the upgrade link there you just add a payment method and upgrade your account and as long as you stick to using only the always free services you'll never actually have to pay even though you upgraded your account you can still access the always free services they're always free no matter what kind of account you're using and for those of you who are a bit worried about accidentally generating a bill by doing this you can actually go to billing and cost management and set up a budget and under budgets here you'll get a budget thing you can actually create a budget that will just alert you if your forecast spending is going to go over say one cent so I'll show you how to do this so let's just create an example here I'll call it budget forecast exceeded choose your compartment choose your root compartment there monthly first day of the month budget amount in dollars the minimum is one dollar so just put one dollar in there and put forecast spend percentage of budget say one percent so if it's forecast to go over one percent of spending say one cent then it's going to send you an email and you can put your email in here so I'll put idea spot class in here and if actually I get a forecast that well I've done something that actually costs money rather than using free resources it's going to send me an email so I can turn those things off if I don't want to spend any money so go ahead and do that gmail.com and then I can create the rule that should be all good there so now I've got my should show up in a second here maybe I need to reload and there we go we've got our example um budget alert there if I actually spend more than one percent of one dollar it'll give me an email I can turn those things off to avoid ever getting a bill but really that should never be necessary these are very generous free tier limits and if you stick to those limits then um it's never going to be an issue one really annoying thing about adding a pay as you go account is it does do a 100 verification authorization on your card so that is a temporary 100 charge that it puts on your card it instantly refunds it but it does take a day or so usually to come back into your account so that can be really annoying for those of you who are on a really tight budget and don't want to see a hundred dollars disappear so someone did raise that in the Oracle support and then they did actually confirm that yeah this is just a verification hold charge it'll be refunded um and then you can contact your bank if you're wondering about how long that's going to take and you can contact Oracle support on that email about the billing that will explain what that process is like if you have any concerns but that just is one little thing I'd want to on you about if you're worried about upgrading to that pay as you go account so after comparing these two options I know a lot of you probably want to try the script method to retry until you get one of those ampere instances it is technically quite difficult you do need a bit of skill to actually pull this off so it's probably a good time to talk about today's sponsor skillshare so thanks skillshare for sponsoring today's video and the class that I like on skillshare is one called WordPress Academy learn WordPress step by step by Chris Dixon this one is 85 lessons eight and a half hours so much deeper than the content you'll find on YouTube in this topic now this one really lets you go deep into the back end of Wordpress it teaches you about the PHP behind how WordPress actually works and you can do customizations custom themes by following this class so I've really enjoyed this one and skillshare are nice enough to give me my own Link in the description and so the first 1000 of you guys who use the link get a free one month trial for skillshare so check that out if you're interested I want to continue to be my own boss and so skillshare I can learn freelance tips for starting new side projects attracting the right clients and developing a business traditional jobs are not one size fits all so learn how to design a career to fit you my goals are to improve my skills in web development and to reach new audiences through video improving in these areas will give me greater control over my career and creative path now I'm a skillshare member myself and one of the classes I've currently been interested in is this one called from Clueless content creator make engaging videos that attract an audience by Aaron palabiab this one has been very helpful in terms of how do I make my tutorial videos more engaging and create the most value in the most compact amount of time I think people have really engaged with this compared to a lot of other tutorials that are waffly and long or don't really deliver the thing that they said they're going to deliver I make sure all my videos deliver and my most successful videos are very good examples of that they've been able to deliver a lot of value in a very streamlined amount of time so thanks to skillshare for pointing me in this sort of direction again that free trial link is in the description below let's get back to our video all right now let's talk about our second issue dealing with Oracle clouds resource maintenance that means when they consider your instance to be idle and they stop the instance and then the resources go back into the pool so other people can use it because they think you're not using it enough so number one actually use your virtual machine so make sure you finish setting up your machine properly run a web server a game server a file server something that will actually use the resources and set it up appropriately so if you're just running a little blog don't use 24 gigabytes of RAM maybe just use four or five or six gigabytes of RAM in my experience whenever I've actually set something up properly on one of the virtual machines I've never gotten one of those emails so it is fairly easy to avoid the idle issue if you actually use your server appropriately number two if you don't want to actually do that you can actually run an automated script just make sure that you're actually using a little bit of CPU power all the time I'll show you how to do that in a couple of ways so he's called Erico has posted this on the Oracle Cloud Reddit you basically just add a Cron job that runs a little bit of a work every every five minutes and it'll just run for 46 seconds a bit of CPU load and just running that as a low priority in the background it'll make sure that you are actually activating the virtual machine all the time and you don't get classified as Idle um he's had success with this script very simple just one line that you paste into your terminal alternatively there is another script I'll link to by drag and drop does very similar thing just runs a bit of load on the CPU so either of those I think will do the job and finally you can always upgrade to that pay as you go account because they're not going to delete idle instances if you're on a pay-as-you-go account you'll get priority and you'll get to keep it even if you're not really running it that often so again if you do that go ahead and create a budget alert to make sure you don't actually accidentally use any budget when you're running your pay-as-you-go account all right so that basically wraps up how to tackle those two really common issues on oracle's free tier if you are interested in any of these other tutorials I've done with Oracle setting up web servers game servers file servers I'll link to those in a playlist at the end of the video so check those out if you're interested but thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: IdeaSpot

Views: 30,093

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Id: Xto9zROBwqY

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023