Oracle Cloud Hello World

Overview

Launch, list, and manage your first OCI compute instance. The most common blocker for new OCI users is the Out of host capacity error when launching Always Free ARM shapes (VM.Standard.A1.Flex). This error means the data center has no available hosts — it is not a permissions issue. The solution is a retry loop that polls until capacity becomes available.

Purpose: Get a running compute instance on OCI, including the capacity retry pattern that makes Always Free ARM shapes actually usable.

Prerequisites

• Completed oraclecloud-install-auth — valid ~/.oci/config with API key authentication
• Python 3.8+ with pip install oci installed
• A subnet OCID in your tenancy (VCN > Subnets in the Console, or use the default VCN)
• An image OCID for your region (Compute > Custom Images, or list platform images via API)
• An SSH public key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (for instance access)

Instructions

Step 1: List Existing Instances