A Kubernetes cluster up in the cloud
With the sunset of Heroku's free tier for its hosting services in November 2022, many of my projects were sadly left for dead and no longer had a publicly accessible endpoint. After considering countless other cost-free offerings to migrate to, I asked myself: "Why don't you just do your own infra?"
So, I provisioned a VM in the cloud, installed Kubernetes on it, dockerized my projects, and deployed them to the new cluster. Since I was building my own solution, it came with the benefit of not being limited by the constraints of Heroku's free tier. For example, I can have databases that are as large as I want (no more 10k row limit). I can enjoy immediate responses from my containers (no more waiting for cold starts after sleeping due to inactivity). I can also host any workload I want without being limited by Heroku's supported runtimes. The cherry on top is that this solution is still cost-free since I'm using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's free tier! (well, unless Oracle decides to pull the plug on that too 😅 **knock on wood**)
This repo contains the Terraform for the Kubernetes cluster itself as well as the source for the core services that run on the cluster.
The setup for the cluster is the bare minimum needed to replicate the features I used on Heroku's platform, compute and data. It is not production-ready by any means.
K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, is installed on the VM. The cluster is comprised of a single node (for now) which is plenty good for hobby projects. It won't be a good idea to host mission-critical workloads on this cluster.
ExternalDNS is used to sync DNS records for Services and Ingresses running on the cluster with Cloudflare, the DNS provider for isupinthe.cloud.
PGO by Crunchy Data is the Postgres operator for the cluster. It is used to provision and manage Postgres databases on the cluster.
Traefik is the Ingress Controller for the cluster. It essentially acts as a reverse proxy and load balancer for Services and Ingresses on the cluster. It routes incoming traffic to the appropriate Service/Ingress.
HashiCorp Terraform is the infrastructure-as-code solution used to provision the cluster. It codifies the configuration for the cluster and its components.