Deploy Your Services on OCI's Free Tier

💡 Your project is done — now what?

As AI coding tools mature, we can turn ideas into real applications faster than ever. But once a project is finished, the next question is often: Where should it be deployed so that other people can actually use it?

For independent developers, students, and side-project creators, the cost of cloud services can be a real burden. Even if you only want to put your work online, you still have to deal with servers, networking, domains, and deployment workflows.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers Always Free services that include a certain amount of free usage, giving us a chance to build our own deployment environment with limited cloud resources.

Starting from OCI’s free tier, this course walks you through setting up a cloud server, deploying containerized applications with Docker, and making your services reachable from the internet through Cloudflare DNS and Tunnel.

Beyond creating cloud resources by hand, we will also take a first look at Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), exploring how to describe and manage infrastructure with code.

And when your application needs ongoing updates, we will go further with GitHub Actions, get to know self-hosted runners, and build a basic automated deployment workflow that cuts down on the repetitive steps of every release.

Along the way, we will also work with OCI Object Storage, database services, and related settings, and get to know the resources an application may need in a cloud environment.

We are not trying to master every aspect of cloud architecture and operations at once. Instead, through hands-on practice, we aim to understand the steps an application goes through from local development to going live in the cloud, and how the various services work together.

🎯 What you will learn

• OCI’s free tier and cloud resources: Learn the basic Always Free services, their free allowances and limitations, and the compatibility issues to watch out for on ARM64.
• Cloud servers and network configuration: From compute instances, Linux, and SSH to basic networking and firewall settings, set up a cloud environment that can run your applications.
• Terraform and Infrastructure as Code: Get a first introduction to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and learn how to describe and create OCI cloud resources with Terraform, along with its basic operations.
• Containerized deployment with Docker: Run applications on a cloud server with Docker and Docker Compose, and learn about container networking, data persistence, and basic configuration.
• Exposing services with Cloudflare: Use Cloudflare DNS, Tunnel, and related settings to make services deployed on OCI accessible through your own domain.
• Automated deployment with GitHub Actions: Understand the differences between GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners, implement a basic CI/CD workflow, and learn the security considerations around runner environments and deployment permissions.
• Cloud data services: Get to know OCI Object Storage and database services, and learn how to integrate these cloud resources into your own applications.

👥 Who this course is for

• Computer science and IT students: You have finished your own programming project and want to deploy it to the cloud so that others can actually use it.
• Independent developers and side-project creators: You want to build your own deployment environment on a limited budget.
• Backend and full-stack developers: You already have application development experience and want to get hands-on with cloud servers, Docker, Terraform, and automated deployment.
• AI-assisted developers: You can already build applications quickly with AI and want to learn how to take them from your local machine to a public cloud environment.

📌 Before you start

You should be comfortable with basic Linux commands and Docker concepts, and have an application ready to practice deploying.

The course uses OCI Always Free resources as its main hands-on environment, but free allowances, service availability, and resource allocation may change with Oracle’s policies and regional capacity. Some operations may also incur additional charges, so please keep an eye on the services you use and your billing settings.

From your local machine to the cloud — let your work move beyond the development environment and go live as a service others can use and share.