A real Kubernetes cluster hosting this site, Buildero, and other side projects. Built on Oracle Cloud’s Always Free tier — 4 ARM cores, 24 GB RAM, free MySQL, automatic TLS, all for $0 a month.

Stack

• Compute — 2 × VM.Standard.A1.Flex ARM nodes (1 server + 1 worker)
• Kubernetes — k3s, single binary, ~512 MB control-plane footprint
• IaC — Terraform provisions VCN, subnets, instances, MySQL, DNS in one apply
• Ingress — Traefik as a DaemonSet with hostNetwork: true (no LoadBalancer needed)
• TLS — cert-manager + Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 via Cloudflare
• DNS / Edge — Cloudflare (apex + wildcard A records)
• Database — MySQL HeatWave Free on a private subnet
• Registry — ttl.sh for ephemeral image hosting

Hosts

This site, Buildero, and other side projects.

The full writeup with Terraform snippets and the Oracle Linux firewalld quirks lives in the $0 Kubernetes Cluster post.