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> Kubernetes is simply too resource-intensive to run on a $10/month VPS with just 1 shared vCPU and 2GB of RAM I hate sounding like an Oracle shill, but Oracle

by Alupis 1y ago

> Kubernetes is simply too resource-intensive to run on a $10/month VPS with just 1 shared vCPU and 2GB of RAM I hate sounding like an Oracle shill, but Oracle Cloud's Free Tier is hands-down the most generous. It can support running quite a bit, including a small k8s cluster[1]. Their k8s backplane service is also free. They'll give you 4 x ARM64 cores and 24GB of ram for free. You can split this into 1-4 nodes, depending on what you want. [1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

lakomen 1y ago
[dead]
waveringana 1y ago
the catch is: no commercial usage and half the time you try to spin up an instance itll tell you theres no room left
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  That limitation (spinning up an instance) only exists if you don't put a payment card in. If you put a payment card in, it goes away immediately. You don't have to actually pay anything, you can provision the always free resources, but obviously in this regard you have to ensure that you don't accidentally provision something with cost. I used terraform to make my little kube cluster on there and have not had a cost event at all in over 1.5 years. I think at one point I accidentally provisioned a volume or something and it cost me like one cent.
- Alupis 1y ago
  > no commercial usage I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed. Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
    Honestly I’m surprised they even let you provision the resources without a payment card. Seems ripe for abuse
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      I would presume account sign up is a loss leader in order to get ~spam~ marketing leads, and that they don't accept mailinator domains
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
        They also, like many other cloud providers, need a real physical payment card. No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. Of course they don’t tell you this outright, because obscurity fraud blah blah blah, but if you try to use any type of virtual card it’s gonna get rejected. And if your naïve ass thought you could pay with the virtual card you’ll get a nice lesson in how cloud providers deal with fraud. They’ll never tell you that virtual cards aren’t allowed, because something something fraud, your payment will just mysteriously fail and you’ll get no guidance as to what went wrong and you have to basically guess it out. This is basically any cloud provider by the way, not specific to Oracle. Ran into this with GCP recently. Insane experience. Pay with card. Get payment rejected by fraud team after several months of successful same amount payments on the same card and they won’t tell what the problem is. They ask for verification. Provide all sorts of verification. On the sixth attempt, send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately It’s such a perfect microcosm capturing of dealing with megacorps today. During that whole ordeal it was painfully obvious that the fraud team on the other side were telling me to recite the correct incantation to pass their filters, but they weren’t allowed to tell me what the incantation was. Only the signals they sent me and some educated guesswork were able to get me over the hurdle
        fishtacos 1y ago
        >No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. I used a privacy.com Mastercard linked to my bank account for Oracle's payment method to upgrade to PAYG. It may have changed, this was a few months ago. Set limit to 100, they charged and reverted $100.
lemoncucumber 1y ago
One thing to watch out for is that you pick your "home region" when you create your account. This cannot be changed later, and your "Always Free" instances can only be created in your home region (the non-free tier doesn't have that restriction). So choose your home region carefully. Also, note that some regions have multiple availability domains (OCI-speak for availability zones) but some only have one AD. Though if you're only running one free instance then ADs don't really matter.
- qwertycrackers 1y ago
  I don't know the details but I know I made this mistake and I still have my Free Tier instances hosted in a different region then my home. It's charged me a month of $1 already so I'm pretty sure it's working.
- dwood_dev 1y ago
  A bit of a nitpick. You get monthly credit for 4c/24gb on ARM, no matter the region. So even if you chose your home region poorly, you can run those instances in any region and only be on the hook for the disk cost. I found this all out the hard way, so I'm paying $2/month to oracle for my disks.
rfl890 1y ago
There are tons of horror stories about OCI's free tier (check r/oraclecloud on reddit, tl;dr: your account may get terminated at any moment and you will lose access to all data with no recovery options). I wouldn't suggest putting anything serious on it.
- thegeekpirate 1y ago
  Can confirm (old comment of mine saying the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215430)
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  Are all of those stories related to people who use it without putting any payment card in? I’ve been happily siphoning Larry Ellisons jet fuel pennies for a good year and a half now and have none of these issues because I put a payment card in
  - dijit 1y ago
    Be careful about putting a payment card in too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902190 which links to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202371
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
      Good call out. I used the machines defined here and have never had any sort of issue like those links describe: https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle
  - thegeekpirate 1y ago
    Nope, my payment method was already entered.
- jwrallie 1y ago
mulakosag 1y ago
I recenlty wrote a guide on how to create a free 3 node cluster in Oracle cloud : https://macgain.net/posts/free-k8-cluster https://macgain.net/posts/free-k8-cluster . This guide currently uses kubeadm to create 3 node (1 control plane, 2 worker nodes) cluster.

by Alupis 1y ago

lakomen 1y ago

[dead]

waveringana 1y ago

the catch is: no commercial usage and half the time you try to spin up an instance itll tell you theres no room left

SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
That limitation (spinning up an instance) only exists if you don't put a payment card in. If you put a payment card in, it goes away immediately. You don't have to actually pay anything, you can provision the always free resources, but obviously in this regard you have to ensure that you don't accidentally provision something with cost. I used terraform to make my little kube cluster on there and have not had a cost event at all in over 1.5 years. I think at one point I accidentally provisioned a volume or something and it cost me like one cent.
Alupis 1y ago
> no commercial usage I think that's if you are literally on their free tier, vs. having a billable account which doesn't accumulate enough charges to be billed. Similar to the sibling comment - you add a credit card and set yourself up to be billed (which removes you from the "free tier"), but you are still granted the resources monthly for free. If you exceed your allocation, they bill the difference.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
  Honestly I’m surprised they even let you provision the resources without a payment card. Seems ripe for abuse
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    I would presume account sign up is a loss leader in order to get ~spam~ marketing leads, and that they don't accept mailinator domains
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
      They also, like many other cloud providers, need a real physical payment card. No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. Of course they don’t tell you this outright, because obscurity fraud blah blah blah, but if you try to use any type of virtual card it’s gonna get rejected. And if your naïve ass thought you could pay with the virtual card you’ll get a nice lesson in how cloud providers deal with fraud. They’ll never tell you that virtual cards aren’t allowed, because something something fraud, your payment will just mysteriously fail and you’ll get no guidance as to what went wrong and you have to basically guess it out. This is basically any cloud provider by the way, not specific to Oracle. Ran into this with GCP recently. Insane experience. Pay with card. Get payment rejected by fraud team after several months of successful same amount payments on the same card and they won’t tell what the problem is. They ask for verification. Provide all sorts of verification. On the sixth attempt, send a picture of a physical card and all holds removed immediately It’s such a perfect microcosm capturing of dealing with megacorps today. During that whole ordeal it was painfully obvious that the fraud team on the other side were telling me to recite the correct incantation to pass their filters, but they weren’t allowed to tell me what the incantation was. Only the signals they sent me and some educated guesswork were able to get me over the hurdle
      - fishtacos 1y ago
        >No privacy.com stuff. No virtual cards. I used a privacy.com Mastercard linked to my bank account for Oracle's payment method to upgrade to PAYG. It may have changed, this was a few months ago. Set limit to 100, they charged and reverted $100.

lemoncucumber 1y ago

One thing to watch out for is that you pick your "home region" when you create your account. This cannot be changed later, and your "Always Free" instances can only be created in your home region (the non-free tier doesn't have that restriction). So choose your home region carefully. Also, note that some regions have multiple availability domains (OCI-speak for availability zones) but some only have one AD. Though if you're only running one free instance then ADs don't really matter.

qwertycrackers 1y ago
I don't know the details but I know I made this mistake and I still have my Free Tier instances hosted in a different region then my home. It's charged me a month of $1 already so I'm pretty sure it's working.
dwood_dev 1y ago
A bit of a nitpick. You get monthly credit for 4c/24gb on ARM, no matter the region. So even if you chose your home region poorly, you can run those instances in any region and only be on the hook for the disk cost. I found this all out the hard way, so I'm paying $2/month to oracle for my disks.

rfl890 1y ago

There are tons of horror stories about OCI's free tier (check r/oraclecloud on reddit, tl;dr: your account may get terminated at any moment and you will lose access to all data with no recovery options). I wouldn't suggest putting anything serious on it.

thegeekpirate 1y ago
Can confirm (old comment of mine saying the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43215430)
SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
Are all of those stories related to people who use it without putting any payment card in? I’ve been happily siphoning Larry Ellisons jet fuel pennies for a good year and a half now and have none of these issues because I put a payment card in
- dijit 1y ago
  Be careful about putting a payment card in too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902190 which links to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33202371
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
    Good call out. I used the machines defined here and have never had any sort of issue like those links describe: https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle
- thegeekpirate 1y ago
  Nope, my payment method was already entered.
jwrallie 1y ago

mulakosag 1y ago

I recenlty wrote a guide on how to create a free 3 node cluster in Oracle cloud : https://macgain.net/posts/free-k8-cluster https://macgain.net/posts/free-k8-cluster . This guide currently uses kubeadm to create 3 node (1 control plane, 2 worker nodes) cluster.