OCI Free Tier Lab¶
Personal project — not Cisco- or Oracle-official
This is a home lab build guide by a Cisco employee on their own time. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or representing Cisco Systems, Inc. or Oracle Corporation. Product references are to publicly available offerings.
A reproducible walk-through for building a free, perpetual Oracle Cloud lab — enough compute, storage, and bandwidth to host a real home lab's public face at $0/month, forever.
What you'll end up with¶
- 2 × AMD E2.1.Micro VMs (1/8 OCPU, 1 GB RAM each, x86_64)
- 1 × Ampere A1.Flex VM (up to 4 OCPU, 24 GB RAM, ARM64)
- All on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
- Caddy in front for automatic TLS (Let's Encrypt via tls-alpn-01)
- Cloudflare DNS pointing multiple hostnames at each public IP
- Enough bandwidth (10 TB/mo egress) for real customer-facing surfaces
Three VMs, three public IPs, as many HTTPS hostnames as you want on each.
Who this is for¶
- Network engineers and SEs who want a working home lab public surface
- Home-lab operators tired of maintaining a self-hosted reverse proxy on residential ISPs (dynamic DNS, ISP blocks on 443, etc.)
- Practitioners who prefer a walk-through over a "you figure it out" README
What this is NOT¶
- Not a production-hardened deployment guide. This is lab-grade; harden further for anything that faces real users at scale.
- Not a substitute for the official Oracle documentation. It complements the official docs with an opinionated recipe.
- Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or representing Oracle Corporation.
Cost¶
$0/month, perpetually, if you stay inside the Always-Free tier. See Staying always-free for the specific checklist.
Oracle asks for a credit card at signup to verify identity and gate abuse. As long as you stay on Always-Free-eligible shapes and services, the card is never charged. There is no "free trial that expires" — the Always-Free tier is designed to be perpetual.
Time budget¶
| Phase | Time |
|---|---|
| Oracle account signup + first login | 15 min |
| VCN + networking | 10 min |
| Provision the two AMD Micros | 15 min |
| Provision the ARM Ampere A1 | 10 min (or hours, waiting on capacity) |
| SSH + first hardening (each instance) | 10 min × 3 |
| Caddy install + first HTTPS URL | 15 min |
| DNS via Cloudflare | 15 min |
| Total | ~90 min hands-on |
The ARM Ampere shape is famously capacity-constrained in some regions — sometimes you get it in 30 seconds, sometimes you retry for hours or days. See Provision the ARM Ampere for the coping strategy.
Prerequisites¶
- A computer with an SSH client (any Linux/macOS terminal, or Windows with PowerShell / WSL / PuTTY)
- A valid credit or debit card (for signup verification only — not charged)
- A phone number Oracle can SMS a verification code to
- A domain you control, plus access to change its nameservers (for DNS via Cloudflare — see DNS with Cloudflare if you don't have one yet)
- About 90 minutes of uninterrupted time
Start here¶
Head to What's actually free to understand what you're signing up for, then walk the guide top-to-bottom.
If you already have an Oracle Cloud account and just want to see the opinionated bits, jump to Caddy and TLS or Multiple hostnames on one IP.
If something isn't working, Troubleshooting is organized by symptom.
Feedback¶
This guide is a living document. If something in the OCI console has moved, if a step doesn't work on your OS, or if you have a better idea — open an issue on GitHub.