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Sign up and tenancy

Oracle account signup is the friction point of this whole guide. The steps below are current as of mid-2026; the OCI console UI shifts occasionally, so treat this as the shape of what to do, not exact-click-by-click if the buttons have moved.

Sign up

  1. Go to oracle.com/cloud/free and click Start for free.
  2. Fill in your email and country.
  3. Verify the email via the link Oracle sends.
  4. Fill out account details:
    • Name — legal name is easiest
    • Address — real address, matches your card
    • Account type — Individual (unless you're actually signing up as a company)
    • Cloud account name — this becomes your tenancy name and part of URLs. Choose deliberately — you cannot rename it later. Something like firstname-lab or yourhandle-lab works. Keep it lowercase, no spaces.
  5. Region — the trickiest choice. See below.
  6. Phone verification — SMS code.
  7. Payment verification — a valid credit or debit card. Oracle holds $1 for a few days to verify, then releases it. Your card is never charged as long as you stay on Always-Free-eligible services.

Signup typically completes in 5-10 minutes, and Oracle activates your tenancy immediately.

Region choice

This is permanent. Your home region cannot be changed later. Pick based on:

Factor Guidance
Latency to you and your users Closer is better. If you're on US East, use us-ashburn-1 or us-east-1 (Newark). If US West, us-phoenix-1. Europe: uk-london-1, eu-frankfurt-1.
ARM Ampere availability Regions vary wildly. Ashburn and Phoenix are usually available. Some newer regions have better availability but higher round-trip time from major population centers.
AMD Micro availability Almost always available in every region.
Regulatory / data residency If you have specific requirements, pick accordingly. Home labs usually don't.

For US East users, us-ashburn-1 is the safe default. For US West, us-phoenix-1. Both have decent ARM availability if you're patient.

First login

After signup, you land on the OCI console at https://cloud.oracle.com/?tenant=<your-tenancy>. Bookmark this URL.

The initial console has a lot of tiles. Ignore all of them except the top-left hamburger menu — that's the navigation you'll actually use.

Understand the tenancy shape

Before you provision anything, understand what you're looking at.

Tenancy (your OCI account)
└── Regions (each region is independent)
    └── Compartments (logical grouping — root exists by default)
        ├── VCNs (Virtual Cloud Networks)
        │   └── Subnets
        │       └── Compute instances
        ├── Block volumes
        └── Object storage

Everything you provision lives in a compartment. The default root compartment is fine for a lab — you don't need to create sub-compartments unless you want to organize resources into logical groups (e.g., a personal-lab compartment separate from a learning-experiments one).

For this guide, use the root compartment. Simpler, and you're the only one accessing it anyway.

IAM basics you need to know

For a solo lab:

  • You are the tenancy administrator. You have full permissions on everything.
  • You do not need to create additional users, groups, or policies for a solo lab.
  • Do enable MFA on your admin user immediately (Profile → My Profile → Multi-Factor Authentication). Use an authenticator app.

If you plan to share the lab with someone else later, create a new user with limited permissions rather than sharing your admin login.

Enable MFA now

While you're thinking about it:

  1. Click your user icon (top right) → My profile.
  2. Left sidebar → Multi-Factor Authentication.
  3. Enable multi-factor authentication, scan the QR code with an authenticator app (1Password, Authy, Google Authenticator, etc.).
  4. Save the recovery codes somewhere safe.

Do this before you provision any instances. Losing access to the OCI console because you didn't enable MFA and now can't remember your password is a very fixable problem — but a slow one.

Sanity-check the tenancy

Hamburger menu → Governance & Administration → Tenancy details. You should see:

  • Tenancy name (what you picked at signup)
  • Tenancy OCID (long identifier — copy this somewhere; useful for CLI later)
  • Home region (permanent)
  • Always Free: Yes

If Always Free shows anything other than Yes, contact Oracle support — you've been placed on a paid trial by mistake.

Next

Head to VCN and networking to build the network your instances will live on.