Return To Blogging and Oracle Cloud

I have made fervent attempt to blog previously. Once I got a hang of it, generally I really liked blogging. Since the monetary incentive of SEO blogging was taken away from me about 8 years ago since I switched to full time employment as a software engineer, my blogging died a slow death.

This is yet another attempt to resurrect it fully, this time around for no incentive, but rather for the sheer joy of it.

I have begun to experiment with Oracle Cloud Platform, mainly because I genuinely like how much free infra is available in the free tier. I like it quite a lot and will probably lean to that. I play with kubernetes quite a lot since the last 3 years and I figured it would be quite nice to have a personal K8s cluster handy, just in case. My current humble M1 Macbook air can do the job well with microk8s, however I do appreciate some added muscle and availability on the cloud ofc.

The nicest bit, as of writing this article is the 24 GB RAM that you receive apart from AMD instances that you get as well. I managed to se tup a nice little K8s cluster (albeit on a single node as of now) on the ampere instance, well under just 20 minutes. Most of it went around fiddling about OCI's interface and learning the differences from AWS's UI

I like that the VPC -> VCN concept mapping is quite relatively straight forward too. As of now, the most striking bit is the "Resource Manager" from Oracle, which gives you the full capability of using Terraform to apply infrastructure directly from OCI instead of using CloudFormation like you do in AWS. This is kind of a big deal as of now for me.

I have also used OCI's Bastion feature to directly tunnel without having to use a Public Subnet Bastion (NICE!). I need to figure out how do I safely tunnel k8s config directly in a way that I start a OCI bastion session from my local machine into the K0s cluster. That should be quite interesting..