OCI Always Free first steps

I started some tests within the Oracle Cloud. I use the “always free” offer. Starting with terraform was straight forward, I was able to provision subnets etc. Weird things happened when I was trying to launch a virtual machine. I got errors like

Error: Service error:NotAuthorizedOrNotFound. Authorization failed or requested resource not found..

Finally, I found out, you can only start up VMs that are “always free” eligible in Frankfurt’s Availability Domain 3.

The same error message was thrown, when I tried to launch an instance group. First I thought if some kind of an IAM problem. Finally, I found out the problem was not a wrong instance group, the problem was I specified a wrong OCID in the instance configuration that is used by the instance group! So you can create invalid instance configurations. I do not think this is a bug because you can only check these configurations if you use them which is the case when creating the instance group.

So the error message is correct for both cases, but I wish there was a little more information given in the error message.