标签：#freetier

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. Recently, I decided to get back into writing and document something I’ve been playing around with: setting up a small homelab environment on an Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS. As a software engineer, I’ve always been interested in what happens behind the scenes when an application moves from my laptop to an actual server. Things like networking, deployment, Linux, containers, firewalls, and DNS are all areas I’ve wanted to understand better through actual hands-on experience rather than just reading about them. The fact that I could do all of this on a free VPS made it even better. Why I Started This Experiment I initially set up an Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS running Ubuntu with: 1 GB RAM 1 vCPU Ubuntu Linux A public IP address I wasn't planning to host anything serious on it. The main goal was simply to use it as a small playground where I could experiment with infrastructure and improve my Linux and system administration skills. Interestingly, the last time I regularly worked with a VPS was probably around seven years ago. Back then, a few friends and I used to rent servers and set up Call of Duty 4 multiplayer servers. We'd spend hours messing around with the server configuration and, of course, playing on it afterwards. Things have changed quite a bit since then. These days, I'm much more interested in software engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, and homelabbing. So I thought it would be fun to take a free VPS and see how much I could actually do with it. First Challenge: K3s on 1 GB of RAM One of the first things I wanted to try was K3s, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution. I wanted to get a basic Kubernetes environment running and use it to experiment with container orchestration. That plan didn't last very long. After installing K3s and starting the server, I noticed the memory usage climbing pretty quickly. With only 1 GB of RAM, there wasn't much room left for anything else. Once I started thinking about running