Oracle Cloud

What can you actually run on a $0/month Always Free cloud server? In this post, I document the end-to-end journey of turning an Oracle Cloud 1 GB AMD Micro instance (amd10) in Tokyo into a multi-service personal cloud hub — complete with Dual-Stack DNS ad-blocking, Google Single Sign-On (SSO), lossless Hi-Res music streaming, a Rust-powered REST & AI MCP API, and a Hugo static blog. 🏗️ Architecture & Network Blueprint graph TD Internet["🌐 Internet / Home Network / Mobile"] --> Caddy["🔒 Caddy (Auto Let's Encrypt SSL)"] subgraph OCI Cloud Instance (amd10 - Tokyo) Caddy -->|/| VietCal["📅 VietCalendar REST & MCP (Rust :8080)"] Caddy -->|files.*| Oauth["🔑 OAuth2-Proxy (Google SSO :4180)"] Oauth --> FileBrowser["📁 FileBrowser Cloud Drive (:8082)"] Caddy -->|music.*| Navidrome["🎵 Navidrome Lossless FLAC (:4533)"] Caddy -->|blog.*| Hugo["📝 Hugo Static Site (:443)"] Caddy -->|adguard.*| AdGuardWeb["🛡️ AdGuard Dashboard (:3000)"] Router["🏠 Home Router (Fiber IPv4 & IPv6)"] --> AdGuardDNS["🛡️ AdGuard DNS Server (:53 & :853 DoT)"] end ⚡ 1. Reclaiming Hardware RAM (The crashkernel Discovery) On a standard 1 GB VM, Linux kdump can silently reserve up to 448 MB RAM (nearly half the server’s memory!). ...

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. ...

How do you turn 3 separate Always Free cloud virtual machines into a resilient, production-grade, multi-architecture Kubernetes cluster capable of running high-performance relational databases, AI vector stores, lossless music streaming, and personal cloud storage? In this post, I will break down the complete architecture of our newly deployed 3-Node Hybrid K3s Cluster running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) under our custom domain vinhthang.dev. 🏛️ The 3-Node Cluster Topology Oracle Cloud’s Always Free tier offers an incredible set of compute resources: ...

Welcome to my personal tech blog! This blog is built using Hugo with the PaperMod theme, served directly by Caddy with automatic Let’s Encrypt SSL. 🌐 What is running on this server: AdGuard Home: Dual-stack network-wide ad & malware blocking (IPv4, IPv6, DoT). VietCalendar: High-performance Rust Lunar Calendar REST API & MCP Server. Navidrome: Bit-perfect lossless FLAC music streaming. FileBrowser: Private cloud storage with Google SSO. Hugo Blog: Ultra-fast static site serving at sub-millisecond speeds with 0 MB RAM overhead! Built with ❤️ on Oracle Linux 10 (amd10 in Tokyo).