Oracle Cloud gives an Always Free tier which allows you to provision low scale VM (1GB memory and 2vCPU) for free. There is no time limit for this; you can keep the VM for as long as Oracle permits.
How can you use this to learn DevOps and SRE?
- Build a central database for all your projects. A separately hosted database is always a good idea, you can scale your application to higher limits and it also provides finer access control and more security.
- Try out new applications on this VM. There is a limit on what you can do with such low resources, however, you should be able to install and configure many tools but one at a time.
- Make your portfolio, or blog, and host it on this server. Make your online presence.
- Learn about networking and security while playing with the management console on Oracle. Try out few things, then break them, then try again.
These are just very specific use cases. You can do much more with a Linux server and the only limitation is your imagination and skills (in this case, also the low resources on the machine). Do try out a few things and if your face any issue then reply to this topic. Let everyone help you.