BOBOBK

Grabbing Free Oracle Cloud Servers and Automating Deployment with Scripts

MISCELLANEOUS

A few days ago, Oracle Cloud opened free account registration allowing lifetime usage of:

  • 2 compute VMs (1 OCPU, 1GB RAM each)
  • 2 autonomous databases
  • Storage, load balancer, and more services

Of course, I registered immediately and chose Korea as the main region for faster access from Shanghai.

Since the Korean region quickly ran out of capacity (Out of host capacity), I explored ways to automate server creation using APIs and oci-cli. This post documents how to use OCI CLI to script the automatic creation of servers.

Environment: I used CentOS. Ubuntu users may need to adapt paths or commands accordingly.

Requirements

  1. Mobile phone (for verification)
  2. Credit card

Initially, one credit card could register multiple accounts, but that was quickly abused. Now it’s one card per account, and many Chinese cards are restricted.

Free Resources Received

  • 2 Autonomous Databases (each with 1 OCPU, 20 GB storage)
  • 2 Compute VMs (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB RAM)
  • 2 Block Volumes (100 GB total, 5 free backups)
  • 10 GB Object Storage and Archive Storage
  • 1 Load Balancer (10 Mbps)
  • 10 TB/month outbound data
  • 500 million ingest datapoints and 1 billion monitoring datapoints
  • 1 million notifications and 1,000 emails per month

Main Steps

  1. Register Oracle Cloud account
  2. Create the first server and record required info
  3. Install oci-cli
  4. Configure CLI and add API keys
  5. Automate server creation with CLI
  6. Automate ARM server creation using Python

1. Register Oracle Cloud Account

Go to Oracle Cloud Free Tier and follow the steps:

  • Email
  • Address
  • Phone number (for verification)
  • Credit card (charged for verification, refunded later)

Use a Gmail account if possible. A U.S. address worked for me.

2. Create the First Server and Record Info

Use Chrome DevTools to inspect the instances network request during server creation. Record the following:

  • availabilityDomain
  • compartmentId
  • subnetId
  • shape (e.g., VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro)
  • ssh_authorized_keys
  • imageId

Also get:

  • User OCID
  • Tenancy OCID

3. Install oci-cli

Run:

bash -c "$(curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oracle/oci-cli/master/scripts/install/install.sh)"

Verify installation:

oci -v

4. Configure CLI and Add API Key

Run:

oci setup config

Upload the generated public key to your user profile in Oracle Cloud Console.

Test with:

oci iam availability-domain list

If no error, configuration succeeded.

5. Automate Server Creation Using CLI

Use the following command, replacing placeholders with your values:

oci compute instance launch 
--availability-domain JCbl:AP-SEOUL-1-AD-1 
--display-name seoul1 
--image-id ocid1.image.oc1.ap-seoul-1.aaaa... 
--subnet-id ocid1.subnet.oc1.ap-seoul-1.aaaa... 
--shape VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro 
--assign-public-ip true 
--metadata '{"ssh_authorized_keys": "ssh-rsa AAAAB3..."}' 
--compartment-id ocid1.tenancy.oc1...

You can write this into a script oci.sh and set up a cron job:

# /root/oci.sh
oci compute instance launch --availability-domain ... # same as above

Cron job:

crontab -e
* * * * * /bin/bash /root/oci.sh >> /root/oracle.log 2>&1

Optional for debugging:

tail -F /root/oracle.log

If there’s no available capacity, you’ll see:

"message": "Out of host capacity.",
"status": 500

Ignore and let it keep trying.

6. Automate ARM Server Creation Using Python

Oracle recently added ARM servers:

  • 4 Ampere A1 cores
  • 24 GB RAM
  • Can be split into up to 4 VMs

Use the following Python script to automate:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import time

cmd = '''
oci compute instance launch 
--availability-domain NFWU:AP-TOKYO-1-AD-1 
--display-name ja_arm 
--image-id ocid1.image.oc1.ap-tokyo-1.aaaa... 
--subnet-id ocid1.subnet.oc1.ap-tokyo-1.aaaa... 
--shape VM.Standard.A1.Flex 
--assign-public-ip false 
--compartment-id ocid1.tenancy.oc1..aaaa... 
--shape-config '{"ocpus":4,"memory_in_gbs":24,"local_disks":200}' 
--metadata '{"ssh_authorized_keys": "ssh-rsa AAAAB3..."}'
'''

while True:
    proc = Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE, encoding="utf-8")
    out, err = proc.communicate()
    if 'LimitExceeded' in err:
        print("Configuration failed or instance already created.")
        break
    time.sleep(10)

Once successful, add IPv4/IPv6 manually.

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