Series: Setting up Oracle Cloud VM - I

Pratik Chandra

Pratik Chandra

— 2 min read

✅ Step 1: Oracle Cloud Account and Compartment Setup

🎯 Goal:

Create a structured Oracle Cloud environment with proper compartments for isolation, VCNs for networking, and prepare for deploying VMs and other resources.

🔹 1.1. Sign up & Initial Login

If you haven’t already:

🔹 1.2. Concepts: Tenancy, Compartment, Region

TermMeaning
TenancyYour root Oracle account; like an AWS organization
RegionGeographic location (e.g., Mumbai, Frankfurt). Choose nearest for latency
CompartmentLogical container for resources (like AWS folders); helps with access control and organization
✅ Compartment is important in DevOps certs — helps in organizing environments (dev, prod, backup).

🛠️ Action: Create a New Compartment

  1. Go to: ☰ Identity & Security → Compartments
  2. Click Create Compartment
  3. Name it: homelab
  4. Description: My free-tier home server lab
  5. Parent: Keep as root
This will help you keep all your project resources isolated and organized.

🔹 1.3. (Optional but Good Practice): Tag Namespace

Oracle allows tagging resources for cost tracking and automation.

🛠️ Steps:

  • Go to Governance & Administration → Tag Namespaces
  • Create a tag namespace like project, and a key like env
  • Use project=homelab, env=dev on future resources

📘 Certification Insight:

In the OCI DevOps Specialist exam, you are expected to:

  • Know how to organize resources using compartments
  • Use tags for cost and policy control
  • Use VCNs and subnets for secure networking

✅ Summary So Far

TaskDone?
OCI Free Tier account created✅
Logged into Console✅
Created compartment homelab✅
Optional tag namespace project:env⬜

✅ Creating compartments is 100% free in Oracle Cloud.

🔹 Why It's Free:

  • Compartments are purely a logical organizational layer, like folders or tags.
  • They don’t consume any compute, storage, or networking resources.
  • You can create dozens of compartments without affecting your Free Tier limits.

🧠 Why Use Compartments (even in Free Tier)?

  • Helps you separate personal vs project vs experimental resources
  • Makes cleanup and cost tracking easier
  • Essential for setting fine-grained IAM policies (important for Oracle DevOps certification)
  • Can assign different users/permissions per compartment

🔐 Certification Tie-In:

In the OCI DevOps certification, you're expected to:

  • Use compartments to manage environmental isolation
  • Apply policy-based access controls per compartment
  • Use them with CI/CD pipelines, dev/test/prod environments

✅ So go ahead and create that homelab compartment — it’s best practice and completely free.

✅ Adding Tag Namespace with keys

Adding a tag namespace

Perfect — let’s set up a Virtual Cloud Network (VCN), which is the foundation for securely connecting your VMs and services in Oracle Cloud.

See you in next part: [[002 Creating new OCI VCN]]

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