Always Free

Why settle for one free cloud provider when you can build an automated, resilient multi-cloud Kubernetes cluster across Oracle Cloud (OCI) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — completely for $0/month? In this post, I walk through the end-to-end process of: Provisioning an Oracle Linux Server 10.1 instance on Google Cloud’s Always Free Tier (gce10). Applying kernel and daemon memory hardening to reclaim ~250 MB of RAM. Joining gce10 as a worker node into our central K3s Kubernetes cluster across a secure WireGuard mesh. Running a head-to-head performance benchmark comparing Apple Silicon M1, OCI Ampere ARM (arm10), GCP Intel Xeon (gce10), and OCI AMD EPYC (amd10/amd11). 🏛️ 1. Multi-Cloud K3s Kubernetes Fleet Architecture Our fleet previously lived entirely in OCI Tokyo. Adding gce10 in GCP Iowa (us-central1) creates a geo-distributed cross-cloud presence with a dedicated US edge outpost. ...

If you have ever tried to launch an ARM64 Ampere A1 Flex compute instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Always Free, you have almost certainly encountered this dreaded error message: 500-InternalError: Out of host capacity for shape VM.Standard.A1.Flex in availability domain... Oracle’s Always Free tier offers one of the most generous compute allowances in the industry—up to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB RAM on enterprise-grade Ampere Altra ARM64 processors. Because of this, capacity in popular data centers (like Tokyo, Seoul, Ashburn, Frankfurt, and Singapore) is constantly saturated. ...