🔶 Creating an Oracle Cloud Account: Tenancy, Home Region and Always Free

What a tenancy and a compartment are, the 30-day trial and the Always Free resources as Oracle documents them now, the one choice you cannot undo (the home region), and the first hour: administrators, policies and a budget alert

What an Oracle Cloud account is

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) uses its own vocabulary. The words that matter first:

• Tenancy: your account as a whole, created automatically when you sign up. It is also the root compartment: the top container of everything you own. Its name (the Cloud Account Name you choose at sign-up) cannot be changed later.
• Compartment: a folder for related resources, and the main OCI tool for organizing. Oracle's documentation lists what compartments are for: to organize and isolate resources, to measure usage and billing, and to control access through policies. You can nest them.
• Identity domain: the container for users, roles, single sign-on and multi-factor authentication. A Default identity domain is created with the tenancy.
• Home region: the region you pick at sign-up, where your identity (IAM) resources have their master definitions. It is permanent. Changes to IAM must be made in the home region and spread to the others automatically. And, which matters even more for learners, Always Free compute instances and Always Free databases can only be created in the home region.
• OCID: the unique identifier of every resource, like ocid1.instance.oc1.phx.abuw4ljr...: ocid1, the type of resource, the realm (oc1 for the commercial cloud), the region (empty for global things such as users and the tenancy), and a unique string. You will paste OCIDs into commands.

The nearest equivalents: a tenancy is like an AWS account or an Azure tenant with its subscription, a compartment is like an Azure resource group (but nestable), and the home region has no counterpart on the other clouds: that permanent choice is Oracle-specific.

The free offers

From Oracle's documentation (read on 6 October 2026):

The Free Trial

• $300 in credits, valid for up to 30 days, for any eligible OCI service.
• A credit card is required at sign-up (a small temporary verification charge is removed automatically) and Oracle says it is not charged unless you upgrade. A mobile phone number is required for most users.
• One account per email address. Some countries must contact Oracle Sales for the offer.
• When the trial ends, the account stays active and Always Free resources continue without interruption. Paid resources created during the trial are reclaimed unless you upgrade.
• During the trial, if you go over the Always Free Arm allowance, Oracle says the extra Ampere A1 instances are disabled and deleted after 30 days unless you upgrade to a paid account.
• A trial, Always Free or pay-as-you-go account can subscribe to only one region (a limit that can be raised on pay-as-you-go through a service limit request).

Always Free: no time limit

The current numbers, from the "Always Free Resources" page:

• Compute: up to 2 AMD micro instances (VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro: 1/8 of a core with burst, 1 GB of memory each, a 50 GB boot volume by default, 50 Mbps to the internet). And Arm instances (VM.Standard.A1.Flex): 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month, which for an Always Free tenancy equals 2 OCPUs and 12 GB of memory, spread over one or two instances.
• Block storage: 200 GB in total (boot volumes and block volumes together) and 5 backups.
• Object Storage: 20 GB combined and 50,000 requests a month (the split for trial and paid accounts is 10 GB each of Standard, Infrequent Access and Archive).
• Databases: 2 Autonomous Databases (1 CPU and 20 GB each), a single-node MySQL HeatWave, and a NoSQL database allowance.
• Network: 10 TB of outbound data a month, 2 VCNs on a free account, one flexible load balancer (10 Mbps), site-to-site VPN connections, and the Bastion service.
• Plus allowances for monitoring, notifications, vault secrets, logging and others.

The free Oracle VM guide builds one. Notice that some guides still say 4 OCPUs and 24 GB for the Arm allowance: Oracle's page today says 2 OCPUs and 12 GB, so the guide here was corrected.

The idle-instance rule

Always Free compute instances can be reclaimed if, during any 7-day period, all of these are true: CPU use (95th percentile) is under 20%, network use is under 20%, and for A1 shapes memory use is under 20%. A server that sits unused may be taken back: use it, or terminate it yourself.

Signing up (from the documentation)

1. Open signup.oraclecloud.com. Choose your country, enter your name and email, and complete the CAPTCHA.
2. Verify the email with the link Oracle sends (it is valid for 30 minutes).
3. Create a password: 8 to 40 characters, with at least one lowercase letter, one uppercase letter, one number and one special character, and it must not contain your name or email.
4. Choose the Cloud Account Name and, carefully, the Home Region. It cannot be changed after sign-up, and it decides where your Always Free compute and databases live. Pick a region close to you that is not famous for being out of Arm capacity (the free VM guide explains the "out of host capacity" problem).
5. Enter your address and phone number.
6. Add a credit or debit card (with a major card logo, no PIN needed). A small temporary charge is made for verification and removed.
7. Accept the terms and choose Start my free trial. You land in the OCI Console, and a welcome email follows.

The first hour

Who you are: the Administrators group

The first user (the one you signed up as) is the default administrator and belongs to the Administrators group, which Oracle's documentation says cannot be deleted, must always have at least one member, and has full access to all services and resources, including IAM. That is the root-user problem of the other clouds again: keep that login for administration, and do daily work as a smaller identity.

• Turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your user. It is a setting of the identity domain (users and MFA are managed there).
• Make a normal user and a group, give the group only what it needs through a policy, and use that user for daily work.

Policies: the grammar

OCI policies are sentences, with this structure (from Oracle's documentation):

Allow group GROUP-NAME to VERB RESOURCE-TYPE in compartment COMPARTMENT-NAME

For example: Allow group NetworkAdmins to manage virtual-network-family in compartment production. The verbs go from inspect (see that it exists), to read, use and manage (everything). Access granted at the tenancy applies to every compartment in it, so grant at the smallest compartment that works. A policy can take a moment to become effective.

Compartments for projects

Make one compartment per project (for example lab) instead of putting things in the root. Then you can see the cost of the project, write policies for it, and clean up by deleting what is in the compartment. (Deleting a compartment: from the documentation I could not read, not verified here. In general a compartment has to be empty first.)

A budget alert

Budgets are in the console under Billing and Cost Management, then Budgets. From the documentation:

• They are soft limits that do not enforce anything. They are for tracking and alerting.
• Alert rules are evaluated every 24 hours, and trigger on actual or forecasted spending reaching a percentage of the budget or a dollar amount. The action is an email with a message you can write.
• A budget can cover the whole tenancy, a compartment (and its children) or a tag. It can be monthly and recurring, or for one period of up to a year.
• All budgets are created in the root compartment, whatever they target, and using them needs a policy such as Allow group accountants to manage usage-budgets in tenancy.

Look at Cost Analysis the day after every experiment, and watch the credit balance during the trial.

The command line

Everything in the console is also available from the OCI CLI (oci) and from Cloud Shell, a terminal in the console that is already signed in. From the documentation, not run here:

oci setup config
oci iam region list --output table
oci os ns get
oci iam availability-domain list --compartment-id TENANCY_OCID

• oci setup config creates the CLI's config file: it asks for your user OCID, tenancy OCID, region and makes an API signing key. (Look at the permissions of the key file, and keep it private.)
• oci iam region list lists the regions. oci os ns get prints your Object Storage namespace. The last command lists your availability domains (see the regions page).
• Your tenancy OCID is in the console: the profile menu, Tenancy, then Show.

Closing down

I could not read Oracle's page on terminating an account, so this page does not describe it. What the documentation I did read supports:

• Terminate the instances (and tick the box to delete the boot volume), delete leftover block volumes, and delete a VCN you created for the test. The free VM guide lists the steps.
• A trial account that you do not upgrade stops billing by itself: after the 30 days the paid resources are reclaimed, and only Always Free remains.
• To close the whole tenancy, follow Oracle's current documentation or contact Oracle Support. Do not assume that stopping an instance stops all charges for it.

The most common mistakes

• Choosing the wrong home region, which cannot be undone. The way out is a new account with another email.
• Using the Administrators login for everything.
• Believing a budget is a limit. It sends email.
• Creating things that are not Always Free, such as extra reserved IPs, bigger shapes or block storage beyond 200 GB.
• Leaving an Always Free server idle and losing it to the reclamation rule.
• Not subscribing to a second region and finding that you cannot, on a trial or Always Free account.
• The two firewalls: the cloud security list and the iptables rules on the instance. See the free VM guide.

The cheat sheet

• Tenancy = the account and the root compartment. Compartment = folder, nestable. Identity domain = users and MFA. Home region = permanent. OCID = unique ID.
• Trial: $300, up to 30 days, card and phone, no charge unless you upgrade, paid resources reclaimed at the end. Always Free: 2 AMD micro VMs, A1 allowance of 2 OCPUs and 12 GB, 200 GB block, 20 GB object, 2 autonomous databases, 10 TB outbound. Compute and databases only in the home region.
• Idle rule: under 20% CPU and network for 7 days can be reclaimed.
• First hour: MFA, a normal user in a group, a policy (Allow group G to VERB RESOURCE in compartment C), a compartment per project, a budget (24-hourly alerts only).
• CLI: oci setup config, oci iam region list, oci os ns get, oci iam availability-domain list --compartment-id OCID.

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