I was looking for some cheap cloud providers to provision a simple vm instance. I just wanted to run wireguard and connect my home network to it so that I can access my homelab clusters and personal PC from public internet securely. Previously I used digitalocean and hetzner. They both are cheap, with just 5$ per month for a single core 1GB RAM machine.
Recently I came across oracle cloud. Oracle provides a few always free resources, which includes 4 ARM cpus with 24GB. Not many people are a fan of ARM machines, But it was perfect for my use case. Actually it is more than enough for me, and completely free for life!
You can find more details here: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
Although the console is not as user friendly as compared to other cloud providers, I was able to set it up quickly. One thing which annoyed me the most is that you are not allowed to create resources in every region (for free users). You have to choose a home region and then it is not possible to change it. Then you are stuck with this region forever. So keep that in mind before creating an account.
Regarding the VM, I have used Ubuntu 20.04 4ARM cpus and 24GB for my machine. It is also possible to create multiple machines as long as the total cpu and memory is under the free tier limit. Another thing I’ve noticed is that, the network interface in the VM doesn’t show the public IP of the machine. I’m no network expert, but my guess is that there is some sort of NAT going on to this machine.
Coming to wireguard, the setup was pretty straightforward. I used the script from https://github.com/angristan/wireguard-install to install the server and setup the client configurations. I didn’t expect it work in the first try, as I thought the script was meant for intel only. It worked anyway. But oracle decided to surprise me again. I was unable to connect to the wireguard server from my local machine. I tried editing the security groups, bound a new security group to the instance and still it didn’t work. After a bit of search, I found the answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54794217/opening-port-80-on-oracle-cloud-infrastructure-compute-node. There were some IPTables rules which blocked the ports to wireguard. Since I couldn’t make sense of the rules, I just dropped the whole set of rules and it worked.