I’m trying to spin up an Always Free Ampere A1 Flex instance, but I keep running into the dreaded "Out of capacity for shape" error. What is currently the most reliable and up-to-date script or method to automate the creation process? Upgrading to PAYG is not an option for me, as I simply cannot afford any accidental charges.

Guys two days ago i complete the checkout of verification payment 1 dollars but today they told me need to activate dotation for pay 1 dollars why it isnt free or what ? And sorry if my english is bad

Hi everyone,

I recently completed my BCA and became interested in Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) after exploring it a bit.

I’m a complete beginner and would like guidance on how to start learning OIC properly. Are there any good online courses, learning paths, or beginner-friendly resources you would recommend?

Also, what fundamentals should I learn alongside OIC (APIs, REST, XML/JSON, SQL, etc.) to build a strong foundation?

I’ve checked Oracle documentation, but I’d appreciate advice from people who have actually learned and worked with OIC.

Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/2kn83ere582h1.png?width=825&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c615203c3669d700faa5b7ded182ab31fec435e

Frankfurt, has been like this for at least 24hours. My usual bandwidth usage is extremely low so I doubt it's just me.

Setup:

• Oracle Cloud Free Tier (Ampere A1 Flex, Ubuntu)
• K3s with default Traefik ingress
• Public subnet
• UFW allows 80/443 + NodePort range
• Traefik service:
  • 80 -> NodePort 42199
  • 443 -> NodePort 42645

What works:

• Ingress works internally
• curl -H "Host: app.example.internal" http://localhost:31339 returns nginx page
• NodePort works locally on VM
• Pods/services/ingress all healthy

What does NOT work:

• curl http://<public-ip>
• curl http://<public-ip>: 42199

Both timeout externally.

Debugging done:

• tcpdump -i any port 80 shows NO inbound external packets
• nc -l 8080 on VM also receives nothing externally
• Security List has ingress rules for 80/443
• VM is in public subnet
• Route table has Internet Gateway

This makes me think OCI networking is blocking traffic before it reaches VM.

Could this be:

• NSG overriding Security List?
• Wrong VNIC/subnet attachment?
• OCI Free Tier networking quirk?
• Something specific to K3s servicelb?

Would appreciate guidance from anyone running K3s/Kubernetes on OCI Free Tier.

I want to share my experience with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) billing in hopes it helps others avoid the same situation. I'll try to be as objective as possible and present the facts.

Background

I'm a student using OCI on a Pay-As-You-Go account, mainly running free-tier resources (A1 Compute, Block Storage, etc.). In mid-April 2026, I accidentally activated the Network Firewall service. I mistakenly believed it was similar to the standard Security Group / Security List feature that other cloud providers offer for free. There was no confirmation dialog or cost estimate shown during the creation process that made the pricing clear to me.

What Happened

• April 17, 2026: Network Firewall instance was created.
• The firewall ran passively in the background. I did not configure it for any production workload, and no actual traffic was processed through it — the billing records confirm that Network Firewall Data Processing remained at 0 GB for the entire period.
• The instance was billed at approximately HK$511.49 per day (~US$65/day) just for existing, regardless of whether it processed any data.
• I only realized the charges after they had accumulated significantly.
• I deleted the resource immediately once I understood the situation.

The Charges

Item	Amount
April billing (Network Firewall Instance, ~314 hours)	HK$6,702.10
Total accumulated cost (Apr 17 – May 5)	HK$8,920.49
Network Firewall Data Processing	HK$0.00
Invoice received (Apr 22–30 portion)	HK$4,402.25

For context, the Network Firewall Instance is priced at ~HK$21.31 per hour on a PAYG basis. That's over HK$500/day, which is a significant amount — especially for a student with no stable income.

My Dispute with Oracle

I opened a billing support request (Case #15470517, "Request for Waiver of Accidental Network Firewall Charges") and communicated the following points:

1. The firewall was never used for any production purpose.
2. Data processing was 0 throughout the entire period — verifiable from Oracle's own billing records.
3. The activation was an honest misunderstanding of the product type.
4. I am a student with no stable income, and this amount has exhausted my savings and caused financial hardship to me.
5. I was not asking Oracle to change their billing policy — I was asking for a goodwill review given the exceptional circumstances.

Oracle's response? The same one-liner, 21 times over a week. More on that below.

What Bothers Me About This

The billing itself is technically correct — the system recorded instance-hours and charged accordingly. I get that. What I can't accept is everything around it.

No cost guardrails whatsoever. When I created the Network Firewall, there was no pricing confirmation, no estimated cost preview, nothing. A student on a PAYG account can spin up a >$60/day enterprise resource with a single click and zero friction. AWS shows you an estimated monthly cost before you confirm. GCP warns you. OCI just lets it happen silently.

Zero spending alerts as HK$500/day burned through. The charges accumulated daily for over two weeks. No email. No notification. No "hey, your bill just jumped 10x." Nothing until I discovered it myself.

21 messages, one answer. I wrote 21 messages over a week — detailed, polite, with evidence that Data Processing was literally zero the entire time. Oracle's response, every single time, was the same copy-paste: "We have confirmed all customer usage has been computed and reported in the system. Therefore, we are unable to provide approval for a waiver." I asked for escalation to a manager. Ignored. I asked for a goodwill review. Ignored. The entire "dispute process" is just one analyst repeating one sentence until you give up.

Other clouds handle this differently. AWS, GCP, and Azure all have documented processes for one-time goodwill credits when usage data clearly shows accidental activation. I'm not asking for a policy change — just basic acknowledgment that charging someone ~US$1,140 for a firewall that processed exactly 0 bytes of traffic might deserve a second look from a human being.

Lessons Learned

• Always check the pricing page before creating ANY OCI resource. Network Firewall is an enterprise-grade product priced accordingly — it is not a free security feature.
• Set up budget alerts immediately when using any cloud platform on a PAYG basis.
• Monitor your cost dashboard daily, especially after creating new resources.
• OCI's free tier is generous, but the gap between free-tier resources and paid enterprise services can be enormous with no guardrails in between.

TL;DR

Accidentally created an OCI Network Firewall as a student. It ran for ~18 days with zero data processed. Got billed ~HK$8,920 (~US$1,140). Oracle refused any waiver or reduction after 21 exchanges over a week. Sharing this so others can be aware of the pricing and lack of cost safeguards on OCI.

Evidence :

• Image 1 & 2: Support case conversation showing Oracle's repeated template responses and my detailed explanations

https://preview.redd.it/xv9jnau6iv1h1.png?width=1316&format=png&auto=webp&s=00fbca4d0f7b2853ba0ac5b58d823c940fcef291

https://preview.redd.it/xnnbcmu7iv1h1.png?width=924&format=png&auto=webp&s=20688c893d8bd725717244b1510f111f3d53d5ad

• Image 3: Official Usage Statement for April 2026 — Row 16: Network Firewall Instance billed 314.47 hours; Row 17: Network Firewall Data Processing = 0.00 GB. Every other service on the account is $0.00 .

https://preview.redd.it/sgz0i5udgv1h1.png?width=2096&format=png&auto=webp&s=95e11803f56bf51bda4209a4ea55bcded4cb2443

*Personal details in screenshots have been redacted. *

**UPDATE:** Someone from Oracle reached out to me via Reddit and is looking into my case internally. They have escalated it to a senior collections director for the APAC region. No promises yet, but this is the first time my case has received any human attention beyond the scripted responses.

I had an account with oracle cloud free tier with my credit card verified back in 2022, then I lost my email account even the Google authenticator code. Then I tried to create new account with new credit card but all accounts showing declined. How can I recover my account or create new account? Please help me

All available shapes are non-free when editing.
When creating a new instance, there are free tier shapes showing (e.g VM.Standard.E2.1.micro)

Or I am alone in this. (-_-)

If anyone does for how many days are you running? I would also like to hear if anyone got terminated doing that. :3

Since today i can to singin to My account te user and password are correct but the plataform send a message , user and password incorrect, someone have the same problem?

I'm tryna get a always free place in ad1 or ad3 in vm.standerd.a1.flex. rn I'm stuck on out of capacity for both so which one has the most room so I have a higher chance of getting a place?

I can’t access it through SSH or from the OCI website.

Either my account got hacked (highly unlikely but very, very possible), or Oracle terminated my services which I don’t think they’re crazy enough to do 😆.

I like to believe the first option, because the alternative hurts to consider.

Contacted the support team, got their attention, but the support team couldn’t support 😂.

Am welcoming help 🙏 😢 😢

Hey everyone,

I’ve been deep in the weeds configuring a highly optimized, custom environment on an Oracle Cloud Always-Free VM Instance (the 4 OCPUs ARM, 24GB RAM setup).

While I’ve made great progress solo tuning the kernel and setting up the infrastructure, I realize it would be much more fun and educational to tackle these projects with a like-minded hobbyist collaborator or study partner.

To be absolutely clear: This is not a job or a paid gig. This is strictly a passion project for learning purposes, sharing knowledge, breaking things, and building real-world DevOps/Sysadmin skills.

🛠️ What the instance is currently doing

Right now, I've built a multi-layered sandbox focused on three main pillars:

1. Advanced Network Routing: A custom-routed, obfuscated encrypted network layer specifically hardened to bypass strict DPI filters and network censorship.
2. Automated Infrastructure: An API-driven automation and workflow stack managing background tasks and web ingress.
3. Containerized Game Servers: A fully operational isolated panel environment for deployment and resource tracking of game servers.

Everything has been heavily optimized at the OS level (custom kernel networking tweaks, BBR congestion control, and connection recycling).

🧠 What we’d be doing & learning together

• Infrastructure Hardening: Designing custom firewalls, log rotation policies, and diving deep into sysctlperformance tuning.
• Network Engineering: Messing with policy-based routing (PBR), secondary VNICs, and handling floating IPs.
• Docker Isolation: Managing multi-container environments, tracking microservice constraints, and learning how to debug raw packet drops via tcpdump and ss.

👋 Who I’m looking for

You don't need to be a senior Cloud Engineer! Whether you are a student or a self-taught enthusiast:

• You have a basic comfort level with the Linux CLI (ssh, fundamental file structures).
• You are genuinely curious about cloud networking, security, Docker, or system architecture.
• You want to build cool setups or more ideas to apply and trade knowledge while working through problems.

If you want to team up to build, break, and optimize some complex setups for the pure fun of it, shoot me a DM! I'm happy to share the specific layout, architecture diagrams, and tools I'm using in private chat.

Let’s build something stable together. 🚀

I have recently come across how nice oracles free resources are and instantly registered for it only to realize that nothing is as good as it looks, after coming across this community i've come to realize the only way to get out of it is upgrading to PAYG as Hyderabad doesn't have another ampere instance except the a1 but i want smthg to keep and forget and not always keep a look out so i took a micro instance and started a bot which tries every 90s on it when can i expect to get the instance if ever

I keep hearing about people's free tier accounts getting terminated unexpectedly and I was wondering if this is usually due to inactivity or misuse? Or is it just a case of accounts being terminated for not upgrading to PAYG? I was planning on using OCI to host 2 of my websites and my lightweight roleplay games, but I would like to find out if it's likely that my account will get terminated unexpectedly for not upgrading to PAYG before I commit to something which may or may not be viable long-term.

Has anyone been told that the OCI Pricelist will be increasing come June 1?

TL;DR: I’m locked out of an old OCI Free Tier account because MFA is required, but the MFA prompt seems broken (“null’s phone 3”). Oracle support says they need credit card details to reset MFA, but they also say there is no card registered on my account, so I can’t complete verification. I have a running VM/data I need to recover and can verify email, tenancy name, tenant OCID privately, phone number, IAM reference number, and resource details. Is there any private manual recovery path for this?

Hi everyone, I’m looking for advice on an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account recovery / MFA issue.

I have an old OCI Free Tier account with a running VM and data I really need to recover. I’m locked out of the OCI Console because MFA is required, but the MFA prompt seems broken/weird — it refers to something like “null’s phone 3,” and I don’t believe I have a valid phone MFA factor connected.

I contacted Oracle Cloud chat support and asked for an MFA reset. They told me the MFA reset process requires verification using the email, tenancy name, identity domain, phone number, and the last 4 digits + expiration date of the credit card used during Free Trial registration.

The problem is that support also told me there is no credit card registered on my account. So I’m stuck in a deadlock:

Oracle requires card details to reset MFA.
Oracle says my account has no card on file.
Because there is no card on file, I physically cannot provide the required card details.
Because I cannot provide card details, support says they cannot reset MFA.

The agent said this is a Free Tier account, so they cannot escalate normally or create a support ticket. They recommended posting on the Oracle forum and said there may be Oracle employees there who can help route the issue.

I also found an official Oracle email from Jan 27, 2025 titled “Final Reminder to Review Changes to the Security Policy for OCI Console Sign-On Policy.” It references OCI IAM and the tenancy. This makes me think the issue may be related to Oracle’s enforced MFA / Security Policy for OCI Console sign-on, not just a normal user-configured MFA setup.

I can verify:

• Account email
• Tenancy / cloud account name
• Tenant OCID privately
• Identity domain
• Phone number
• Oracle IAM announcement reference number privately
• Details about resources in the tenancy / running VM

But I cannot verify a credit card if Oracle says there is no card on file.

Has anyone dealt with this before? Is there any private manual account recovery path for OCI Free Tier accounts where MFA is broken and no card is registered? Is there a specific Oracle team, forum category, or escalation path I should use?

I’m not looking for compute support — I just need account access / MFA recovery so I can get back into my tenancy or at least recover my data from the VM.

Any advice would be appreciated.

When can I get the Always free ampere instance, I setup a script which tries again and again, but for how much time, is there any specific time when I can get??

not trying to state this like i know for sure, i’m just genuinely confused now

a while back my oracle account got messed up / suspended after some auto verification failed and at that time my international transactions were OFF on my debit card. i honestly thought oracle only did some tiny $1 check sometimes so i never expected it to matter later

then i asked live support and they said the timing is random, amount is not fixed, and it depends on the bank. they also said keeping around a $100 international limit is safer for verification stuff

so now i’m wondering, is the whole “just keep $1 limit on and you’re fine” thing actually real for long-term PAYG users or is that just what worked for some people? because if oracle can hit with a different verification amount later then a $1 limit sounds kinda useless

anyone here using OCI for a long time, especially Always Free / PAYG, what do you actually keep on your debit card? and have you ever seen a random verification hold after upgrading?

I also switched to a paid account,
There was no notification that Oracle was terminating my account.

https://preview.redd.it/yflqywga5v0h1.png?width=577&format=png&auto=webp&s=a5b0b10a49a0f8029e74ff601b0d414934aca4e3

How am I supposed to accept this? What about my development file?