One of my fondest memories of my previous job was working with VMware virtualization products. With VMware Workstation, system administrators had the ability to "move" a virtual machine (VM) from a local workstation to vSphere. It was no surprise then that I was very exited (and itching to play) when VirtualBox 6.0 was released with a new feature: support for exporting a VM to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)!
It took a little longer than I had hoped to publish the next article in this series about my experience with a 30-day Oracle Cloud trial. I had a created compute instance in the same compartment and that messed up my estimates. That's just one piece of the puzzle.
After running my Oracle Application Express (APEX) instance (see the previous article on what it takes) for more than a day, I think I have enough to take a first measure of costs and fact check the prices listed by Oracle!
Remember this ad?
IBM BladeCenters were revolutionary at its time. System Administrators would know that one of the largest expense when building out a server infrastructure is real estate costs. Shrinking racks of servers and consolidating into blade servers meant you could put more hardware in less space. However, they were expensive and had their fair share of skeptics. Adopting a proprietary backbone simply meant you were investing into a brand and hence subject to vendor lock-in.
Then came virtualization. With more powerful CPUs, cheaper RAMs and more cost-effective storage solutions, we are now able to cramp more servers into a single server. Other pieces of traditional server infrastructure, e.g. network and storage, could be "software-defined". The server footprint very much "vanished into thin air"!
I have read many comments on social media and blogs about various experiences using the Oracle Cloud for hosting web applications and databases. There are probably more bad than good accounts, and so I wanted to experience the process myself using a trial subscription.
Typically, a trial account only gets you a US$300 credit to use on the Oracle Cloud. The credits are good 30 days, after that, either your upgrade to a paid plan, or you lose everything. You are also required to provide a valid credit card for verification purposes only. According to the sign up page, users are only billed after choosing to "upgrade" the account.