Oracle has announced its free tier in the last Oracle Open World (https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/) and unlike other cloud providers Oracle free is free forever. A truly transformative offering that can empower any aspiring startup to build its MVP free of charge and operate it until they are revenue positive, In this “How To” I’ll walk you through the process of provisioning an Ubuntu machine on the cloud and how to access it using SSH and VNC (if you are need GUI access).
Let me know in the comments how you use your freely provisioned ubuntu machine.
I. Start by creating a pem key
On linux/mac its as simple as
$ssh-keygen -t rsa
for Windows use puttygen to generate keys https://www.puttygen.com
II. Create free OCI account
You’ll need credit card for identity verification and a phone number.
Go to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
III. Create Compute VM
For simplicity’s sake we’ll create the image on the root compartment
From the menu pick Compute > Instances > Create Instances
Select the assign a public IP address in order to be able to access the machine remotely and keep other settings as default
Add the public key you generated earlier
III. Connect to the machine using SSH
Get the machine IP from the console once the machine is in running state
$ ssh -i <YourKey> ubuntu@<MachineIP>ate
And now you have access to an ubuntu box in the cloud with internet access, on which you can run your own website, webservice or even just use it as a jump box to your environment.
IV. Install and Configure VNC server (Optional)
If you are interested in having a VNC server on your machine
$sudo apt update
$sudo apt install xfce4 xfce4-goodies
$sudo apt install tightvncserver
$vncserver
Create SSH tunnel from your machine to the ubuntu server, assuming you have linux / mac
$ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 ubuntu@<MachineIP> -i <YourKey>
for windows you can use Putty plink utility
plink.exe -N -L 5901:localhost:5901 myusername@myLinuxBox
from your VNCviewer dial up your machine using
localhost:5901
