How to actually get an ARM instance on Oracle Cloud Free Tier

Why this happens

Oracle's Always Free ARM Ampere A1 capacity is genuinely oversubscribed. Paid tenancies get first pick, and free-tier requests hit whatever's left. A single retry usually fails; a patient retry loop almost always succeeds.

Prerequisites

• An Oracle Cloud account (see the signup guide).
• oci-cli installed and configured (oci setup config).
• An instance.json payload describing the ARM instance you want.

The retry script

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -u

ATTEMPT=0
while true; do
  ATTEMPT=$((ATTEMPT + 1))
  echo "[$(date -Is)] attempt #$ATTEMPT"

  if oci compute instance launch \
       --from-json file://instance.json \
       --wait-for-state RUNNING 2>&1 | tee -a launch.log; then
    echo "instance launched — exiting"
    break
  fi

  # jittered 5-15 minute backoff
  SLEEP=$((RANDOM % 600 + 300))
  echo "sleeping $SLEEP seconds"
  sleep "$SLEEP"
done

Rotating across availability domains

Most regions have 3 ADs. Duplicate instance.json as ad1.json, ad2.json, ad3.json and rotate the --from-json argument each attempt — capacity is per-AD, so this multiplies your chances 3×.

Run it forever with systemd (or GitHub Actions)

Drop the script into /usr/local/bin/oci-retry.sh, add a systemd unit with Restart=always, and forget about it. Alternatively, schedule a GitHub Actions workflow_dispatch that runs the script for 5 hours per invocation — free tier gives you 2,000 minutes/month.

If it still won't launch after 48 hours

Upgrade to Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG). It costs $0 as long as you stay inside Always Free limits, but paid tenancies bypass the ARM capacity queue almost immediately. See our capacity error fix guide for the full escalation path.

Once you're in, Cheaploy takes over: it detects your app's stack, generates a production-grade Dockerfile, provisions a VCN + load balancer + SSL, and deploys — all for $0/month on the ARM instance you just fought for.