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Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

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Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#201

Post by thriftwy »

jfrunyon wrote: post #195
worik wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service. If I make up charges for you and you refuse to pay, I can cease offering the service (to everybody) but I cannot just cut you out because you will not pay the out of contract charge. These laws are to protect people who belong to groups that commonly get discriminated against.

> IANAL But AFAIK in civilised jurisdictions if I offer a service for money, and you offer money, I must offer the service. First off, you need to stop using the (incredibly loaded) word "civilized". Second, I am not aware of ANY jurisdiction in which businesses are required to provide their services or products to anyone . Third, THIS IS NOT AN "OUT OF CONTRACT CHARGE". This is a charge which IS IN THE CONTRACT. Fou…

When selling to consumers, you can't force an arbitrary contract on them and demand that they pay you in various tangential circumstances. Neither you are a bank neither them are your insurer.

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#202

Post by ccpcx »

dijit wrote: post #34

Be extremely wary of Oracle free tiers. They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance. This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my car…

According to them, it's impossible to accidentally use something that's not free; you have to deliberately upgrade to a paid account. Freshness not guaranteed, salt to taste

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#203

Post by ccpcx »

chomp wrote: post #21

I played around with Oracles free tier. When you first sign up, you must choose a “home” region. You cannot add another region on the free plan. These awesome free instances are very limited stock. You have no way of knowing if the region you choose has stock of the desired instances before you select the region. You may not change your “home” region. You will get sales phone calls. Caveat emptor.

You have to keep trying. Capacity renews every so often. Save the VM as a job and try to run it every day or so, or there's a script floating around that you can run on one of the tiny standard free VMs to attempt until it works

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#204

Post by ccpcx »

GordonS wrote: post #10
sgt wrote: post #2

Can you run a small business on this, indefinitey, for free?

There's absolutely no way Oracle will continue giving this away free indefinitely. With the rush they're likely to get just from this being on HN, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least temporarily disabled because of over-subscription. As an aside, I've looked at Oracle Cloud before, and pricing definitely seems favourable compared to the big 3, and IIRC they even include a good chunk of bandwidth for free. But... I…

Yeah it's ten terabytes of data transfer out per month for free. That would cost like $900 on AWS

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#206

Post by itsabigworld »

jfrunyon wrote: post #197
itsabigworld wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for other jurisdictions, but Norwegian law explicitly says that you can't demand payment in that case, even if you have a contract that says otherwise. æøå

The Norwegian law you referenced appears to say you can't charge for debt collection (unless conditions are met). This has nothing to do with debt collection. In fact it has nothing to do with debt . But you know what man, go ahead, try and scam someone with an NSF or decline and see how it goes. (Disclaimer: I don't speak Norwegian or any of the other languages)

But I do speak Norwegian, so how about assuming I know what the law is about? It is not just about debt collection, it is about any kind of failed payment, including a declined card for a service you're subscribed to.

In the event that your card is declined, they are obliged to give you a written notice with at least a 14 day deadline (§9) and they can't charge extra for that, or anything else beyond what they would for normal billing (§18), as long as you pay within that deadline (§17). Any agreements or contracts you enter that state otherwise are explicitly null and void (§3).

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#207

Post by GordonS »

ccpcx wrote: post #202
dijit wrote: post #34

Be extremely wary of Oracle free tiers. They offered a free tier and forced me to choose a shape. I chose the smallest of the two “shapes” but it was apparently not free. This was not especially clear until I got my first bill (it was extortionate; like 60eur/mo for 1cpu/2g ram) so I stopped/removed the instance. This did not prevent me from being billed the next month, or the next month. They charged me until my car…

According to them, it's impossible to accidentally use something that's not free; you have to deliberately upgrade to a paid account. Freshness not guaranteed, salt to taste

Do you not need to provide card details to create an account? Serious question, as I thought you did for AWS, GCP and Azure (with some exceptions for "special" Azure account types).

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#208

Post by itsabigworld »

jfrunyon wrote: post #196
niij wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IANAL That much is clear. Charging a fee for providing bad payment info is legal. See "bounced check" fees.

LOL @ the guy replying to you acting like collection costs ("§ 17. The debtor's responsibility for costs of extrajudicial collection") is somehow relevant... :)

And LOL @ you not understanding that law :)

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#209

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

I've run CoreMark PRO on one of those free Ampere 4-core + 24 GB RAM instances, running Oracle Linux 8.4. TL;DR: that free instance performs very very well.

  WORKLOAD RESULTS TABLE
  
                                                   MultiCore SingleCore           
  Workload Name                                     (iter/s)   (iter/s)    Scaling
  ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ----------
  cjpeg-rose7-preset                                  625.00     172.41       3.63
  core                                                  6.86       1.72       3.99
  linear_alg-mid-100x100-sp                           595.24     154.80       3.85
  loops-all-mid-10k-sp                                 29.96       7.80       3.84
  nnet_test                                            28.09       8.45       3.32
  parser-125k                                         190.48      50.00       3.81
  radix2-big-64k                                     3289.47     848.90       3.87
  sha-test                                           1000.00     277.78       3.60
  zip-test                                            500.00     125.00       4.00
  
  MARK RESULTS TABLE
  
  Mark Name                                        MultiCore SingleCore    Scaling
  ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ----------
  CoreMark-PRO                                      23719.00    6305.03       3.76
For comparison, this is the result on my laptop: Intel Core i7-10850H @ 2.70 GHz, with 32 GB RAM and RHEL 8.4 x86_64:

  WORKLOAD RESULTS TABLE
  
                                                   MultiCore SingleCore           
  Workload Name                                     (iter/s)   (iter/s)    Scaling
  ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ----------
  cjpeg-rose7-preset                                  833.33     166.67       5.00
  core                                                 10.31       1.99       5.18
  linear_alg-mid-100x100-sp                          1063.83     236.97       4.49
  loops-all-mid-10k-sp                                 34.29       8.55       4.01
  nnet_test                                            36.10       8.64       4.18
  parser-125k                                         111.11      23.81       4.67
  radix2-big-64k                                     2890.17     716.85       4.03
  sha-test                                            909.09     208.33       4.36
  zip-test                                            666.67     200.00       3.33
  
  MARK RESULTS TABLE
  
  Mark Name                                        MultiCore SingleCore    Scaling
  ----------------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ----------
  CoreMark-PRO                                      27058.61    6251.38       4.33
So that free Ampere instance performs slightly better than my i7-10850H on single-core, and just 10% slower on multi-core (and that's considering my i7-10850H has 6 cores, while the Ampere has only 4 cores!!!).

Re: Oracle Giving Away 4-Core 24 GB Memory Ampere Instances

#210

Post by discardedrefuse »

Necro-ing this post because I, too, was tempted to check this out. So I opened an Oracle Cloud account on the 10th, though I never created any instances. All I did was setup MFA on the account (which, BTW, was obscenely difficult to enable) and look around a bit. Oracle makes you add a credit card during account creation and they do a $1.00 temporary charge to make sure the card is valid.

Well, here we are 3 days later and I have 3 x $1.00 charges pending on my credit card from Oracle (2 on the 10th and 1 today). I don't know if these charges will actually post to my card or disappear like they're supposed to; but this doesn't look good.

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