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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers a compelling proposition for cost-conscious workloads: an always-free tier that includes two AMD Compute VMs, 4 ARM-based Ampere A1 instances (up to 24 GB RAM), two Autonomous Databases, and 200 GB of object storage — all at zero cost indefinitely. Hellenic Technologies leverages OCI’s free and paid tiers strategically, making it an excellent fit for startups, internal tools, development environments, and supplementary compute capacity. OCI’s ARM-based Ampere A1 instances deliver exceptional price-to-performance ratios for CPU-bound workloads. A four-core, 24 GB RAM instance on the always-free tier can comfortably run a production-grade application stack including Nginx, a Node.js or Python API, and PostgreSQL. For workloads that need to scale beyond free tier limits, OCI’s paid compute is consistently cheaper than equivalent AWS or Azure instances. Oracle Autonomous Database handles routine DBA tasks automatically — indexing, vacuuming, query optimisation, and patching — making it suitable for teams without a dedicated DBA. We configure Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) for OLTP workloads and Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) for analytics, with automatic backups and point-in-time recovery included. OCI services we configure and manage:
  • Always-free AMD and Ampere A1 instances with VCN networking
  • OCI Compute with flexible shapes and custom images
  • Autonomous Database (ATP and ADW) setup and optimisation
  • OCI Object Storage with pre-authenticated requests and lifecycle rules
  • Virtual Cloud Network (VCN), security lists, and NAT gateway
  • OCI Load Balancer with backend health checks
  • Vault for secrets and encryption key management
  • OCI Monitoring and Notifications for alerting
  • Cost tracking and budget alerts to stay within free tier limits