Containers, The Wrong Way, For Always-Free Fun and Profit

Oracle Cloud offers a genuinely always-free tier with 4 ARM Ampere Altra cores, 24GB RAM, and 200GB storage, which can be set up in minutes. The author walks through provisioning this VM and installing K3s to get a single-node Kubernetes cluster running on ARM for free. The post frames this as an ideal homelab setup, noting the ARM64 container ecosystem is now mature enough for practical use.