Note 1: The details in this post assume that you already have an Oracle Cloud free tier (or upgraded!) account. If you don’t you can get one here.
Note 2: Given the regular release schedule present in Oracle Cloud, it is possible that the screens may change somewhat beyond the writing of this post. If this happens, please comment on this post and I will try to help you out. (and update this post!)

In Oracle Cloud, compartments are used to implement a degree of organization to your provisioned resources. They can also help you to more easily control access to your nicely organized resources. Assuming you are organizing things well, Compartments should be a collection provisioned resources that are related to one another and might typically be accessed/controlled by the same kind of user. In doing so permissions can be given to specific user groups to access and manage a compartment by an administrator.

It’s important to consider your compartment structure before you begin provisioning. Once you have created a compartment, you can’t alter it’s name. In addition, once you have provisioned resources in a compartment, you can’t move these resources to a new compartment – think first!

In this post, I will explain how you can very easily create a compartment in Oracle Cloud.

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Create a Compartment

Step 1: Log into your Oracle Cloud account (free tier is suitable)

Step 2: Click on the menu icon (often referred to as “Hamburger” or “Pancake Stack” icon)

Step 3: Select “Identity & Security” and then select “Compartments”

Step 4: You will be presented with the Compartment management screen. Here you can see that I already have 3 compartments provisioned (2 of these are auto-provisioned by Oracle when the tenancy was created). Click “Create Compartment”

Step 5: Provide basic information for the compartment creation and click “Create”

Note that you can amend the “Parent Compartment” – this allows you to implement granular levels of organisation of your compartments and resources. (The default value will be your “(root)” compartment).

Step 6: As you can see in the screenshot below, my new compartment does not show in the compartment management screen

The reason for this is that I didn’t choose my root compartment as parent. If you did, you would see it here. Instead, to view my new compartment, I need to click on the compartment I chose as the parent (“ASG”). Now I can see my new compartment and it will be available for use within Oracle Cloud