OCI on Vinh Thang's AI Tech Noteshttps://vinhthang.dev/tags/oci/Recent content in OCI on Vinh Thang's AI Tech NotesHugoen-usMon, 24 Aug 2026 18:45:00 +0700How to Snag the Elusive Oracle Cloud Always Free ARM64 Ampere A1 Instancehttps://vinhthang.dev/posts/snagging-oracle-always-free-arm-ampere/Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:45:00 +0700https://vinhthang.dev/posts/snagging-oracle-always-free-arm-ampere/<p>If you have ever tried to launch an <strong>ARM64 Ampere A1 Flex</strong> compute instance on <strong>Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Always Free</strong>, you have almost certainly encountered this dreaded error message:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>500-InternalError: Out of host capacity for shape VM.Standard.A1.Flex in availability domain...</code></p> </blockquote> <p>Oracle&rsquo;s Always Free tier offers one of the most generous compute allowances in the industry—<strong>up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB RAM</strong> on enterprise-grade Ampere Altra ARM64 processors. Because of this, capacity in popular data centers (like Tokyo, Seoul, Ashburn, Frankfurt, and Singapore) is constantly saturated.</p>