My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage. Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task (setting up a BookStackApp server) took considerably longer than it did on most services on which you pay.
What I'm trying to say is that you do get what you pay for (or don't).
I'm sorry that you experienced that. I work on the team responsible for the instance agent. We're aware that there have been performance and resource issues with it, and are always trying to drive down resource usage. If you're okay without any metrics for the instance, you can always completely disable the agent.
Over the last several months we've migrated most things to Go (which was always the ultimate goal), and introduced a plug-in based approach with it. Recently we enabled a feature to allow you to enable or disable plug-ins used by the instance agent dynamically.
On the Free Tier with your VMs it's currently impossible to get a cluster (with say MicroK8s or K3s) up and running and responding to requests. Either the free resources limits quoted are wrong or something else is afoot.
There shouldn't be any difference between the quoted resource limits and reality, if there is something is definitely wrong, and I want to get that identified and resolved.
I haven't had time / opportunity to look in to Microk8s or k3s. Would it be straightforward for me to replicate what you were seeing? Just follow a simple online tutorial?
Note: We built/build OCI with security in mind, and encouraging a more secure-by-default approach. All of the standard platform images come with the firewall enabled and locked down, and the default network security groups are locked down too. One example brought up in the earlier days of the platform build out were all those times you see people's MongoDB accidentally exposed. Obviously this is a total guess as to what you ran in to, it's definitely something that trips up customers.
I did open ports I thought I needed for K3s and MicroK8s but I may not have caught all of them. Any simple online tutorial should get you to where I was!
It'd be really great to show developers they have a place they can make toy clusters without having to worry about gotcha charges.
Oracle cloud pricing seems competitive against the big 3, and providing 10TB of free egress is very generous by comparison (that'd cost you around $1k with the big 3!). But Oracle has such a terrible reputation for behaving like an absolute shit, that I've never really considered with any seriousness, or even signed up for a trial.
Would be interesting to see a comparison of Oracle cloud to AWS/Azure/GCP, from the perspective of a developer or architect. If of course Oracle allows such comparisons in their terms and conditions...
I would argue that Oracle had more to do with that than the fact that it was free... Using the paid version would probably have been even more difficult.
I appreciate there's an uphill battle here to gain HN user trust. It is Oracle after all. OCI is a very different from what you've seen from Oracle in the past. It was created by ex-AWS, Azure, and GCP engineers, based on our collective experiences within those platforms. From some regards you might say we are to Oracle, what Azure was to Microsoft earlier on. A wildly different way of doing things.
Using standard / paid instances should be no more difficult or hard than using free-tier ones, other than the obvious need to have converted to a non-free account and, I believe, sorted out payment methods. They launch and run the same way, just when you have a paid account you can launch on larger instances. We've got enough things we want to do with the cloud, without having to resort to building lots of separate experiences and code paths for free tier accounts.
Disclaimer: opinion is entirely my own, may not reflect the opinions of my employers, etc.
Is Oracle going to start putting their OCI API client code into distros and get distros official accounts for distributing images etc? (Debian would be my first choice for this)
I'm not sure what the plan is for the SDKs, that's handled by a completely different team.
The SDKs are open source and can be installed fairly easily, e.g. the python sdk is up in pypi, as is the oci cli.
Vendors are welcome to sign up and start publishing images via the marketplace on our platform. That's an option available today, without specific need for OCI to engage. SuSE are in there, for example.
What I'm trying to say is that you do get what you pay for (or don't).