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

Prelude: Oracle Cloud's Always-Free Tier Oracle Cloud has an always-free tier. Not a trial. Not "free for 12 months." Always free. Four ARM-based cores, 24GB of RAM, 200GB of storage. For nothing. Forever. Their Ampere Altra processors are genuinely good silicon. People benchmark these against x86 and come away impressed. And the ARM64 ecosystem is in good shape — most container images you'll actually use (your databases, your ingress controllers, your monitoring stack) have ARM64 builds. The days of "does this even run on ARM" are mostly behind us. The fact that Oracle is giving this hardware away to get people onto their platform is, frankly, their problem. If you have any kind of homelab itch — self-hosted apps, a personal Kubernetes playground, a place to run things you don't want living on your laptop — you should have one of these VMs. The barrier is a credit card for verification (they won't charge it) and about twenty minutes. The VM Once you have an account, getting a VM up is