Getting Started with OCI Compute: Provisioning Your First Virtual Machine

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute is the backbone of cloud-native workloads on Oracle's platform. Whether you're running enterprise applications, development environments, or high-performance computing jobs, OCI Compute provides the flexibility and performance you need.

Understanding OCI Compute Shapes

OCI offers a variety of compute shapes to match different workload requirements. Standard shapes provide a balanced ratio of CPU to memory, while DenseIO shapes are optimized for I/O-intensive workloads with locally attached NVMe SSDs. Flexible shapes allow you to customize the number of OCPUs and memory independently.

The Ampere A1 Compute shapes, based on Arm architecture, offer exceptional price-performance for cloud-native applications and are available with a generous Always Free tier — up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory at no cost.

Creating Your First Instance

To provision a compute instance, navigate to the OCI Console and select Compute > Instances > Create Instance. You will need to specify:

- Name and Compartment: Organize resources within your tenancy hierarchy

- Availability Domain: Choose the fault domain for high availability

- Image: Select from Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, Windows Server, or custom images

- Shape: Pick the compute shape that matches your workload

- Networking: Attach to a Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) and subnet

- SSH Key: Upload your public key for secure access

Connecting to Your Instance

Once the instance reaches the Running state, connect via SSH using the public IP address:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/oci_key opc@<public-ip-address>

The default username is `opc` for Oracle Linux and CentOS images, and `ubuntu` for Ubuntu images.

Best Practices

Always use compartments to organize and isolate resources. Leverage instance metadata and user data scripts for automated configuration at launch. Enable monitoring agents to collect performance metrics, and configure autoscaling groups for production workloads that require elastic capacity.