Oracle Cloud - Prevent Idle Instances

Oracle Cloud has started shutting down and terminating Free Tier VM instances that are idle OCI Free Tier Restrictions.

The lookbusy app consumes CPU, RAM and disk IO to avoid the instances being classified as inactive.

Alternately, you can upgrade to a paid Pay As You Go (PAYG) subscription to avoid idle instances being reclaimed by Oracle.

Files

startlooking.sh - below shell script
lookbusy binary for x86/Arm

#!/bin/bash
# Filename: /opt/oci-load/startlooking.sh

# Run this hourly via cron
# eg.  @hourly nobody /opt/oci-load/startlooking.sh

# Look busy:
#  - x86/Arm binaries: https://github.com/velor2012/lookbusy-docker
#  - Source: https://github.com/flow2000/lookbusy

LOOKBUSY=/opt/oci-load/lookbusy

WGET=/usr/bin/wget
FLOCK=/usr/bin/flock
FLOCK_FILE=/tmp/.oci-load.flock

# Use flock to prevent multiple instances of lookbusy
# CPU: 5-15%, RAM: 2GB, Disk IO: 100M
${FLOCK} -nx "${FLOCK_FILE}"    ${LOOKBUSY} -q -c 5-15 -r curve -n 1 -m 2GB -d 100MB &

# Download some random stuff, wait 1-10 mins before running wget
sleep $((1 + RANDOM % 600)) && ${WGET} -q -O /dev/null https://speed.hetzner.de/100MB.bin
sleep $((1 + RANDOM % 600)) && ${WGET} -q -O /dev/null https://speedtest.mumbai1.linode.com/100MB-mumbai.bin