Oracle-Cloud

A few weeks ago I wrote about building a $0/month enterprise platform on Oracle’s free ARM tier. Twenty-one pods, service mesh, secrets management, AI observability — the whole works, running on a single ARM instance with 24GB of RAM. It worked. Everything was up. The pods were green. I could hit my apps through Traefik and feel smug about paying nothing. But here’s the thing about infrastructure: running is the easy part. The hard part is knowing whether it’s running well — and whether it’ll keep running when something goes sideways at 3 AM. ...

I wanted to run real applications—not toy projects, but actual software I’d use daily. Finance tracking. Job search management. Jupyter notebooks. AI observability for my Claude Code sessions. But I also wanted to do it right. Not “throw it in a Docker container and hope for the best” right. Actually right: Encrypted service-to-service communication Centralized secrets management Automatic failover and recovery Observable, debuggable, maintainable The catch? I didn’t want to pay $50-200/month for a “real” Kubernetes cluster. ...