Deploy VSCode Server on OCI with Terraform
Terraform project that deploys VSCode Server on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using only the free tier.
WARNING: This project is currently under active development. Please check back later.
The challenge
Goal
Deploy a free and easy maintenable VSCode Server.
Limitations
Currently, Oracle Cloud Free tier provides great performance (4vCPU ARM based, 24GB of RAM, and 200GB of storage), but:
- The instances are preemptible, which means that they can be terminated at any time
- We can't create custom images (with Packer for ex.), so we have to install VSCode Server and other dependencies at boot time
- Can be hard to find an OCI datacenter that still has available capacity
Use cases
- Code from any computer with your VSCode and your tools without any install
- Code from your tablet or slow computer with a remote VSCode Server
- Onboard a new team member without spending the first days configuring VSCode and other tools on their computer
How to start
Create an OCI account
Signup for a free OCI account here.
If you're new to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you need to the following:
- Tenant: kind of an account, like a company or an organization
- Compartment: it's a isolated area to deploy a project or an environment (similar a GCP project).
I recommend to create a new compartment for deploying VSCode Server, that way you will be able to use share free tier resource for a different project or rebuild from scratch a new VSCode Server instead of using the default compartment.
Configure the OCI authentication
Deploy the VSCode Server instance
Access to VSCode Server from your browser
Create a Cloudflare acount (optional)
Signup for a free Cloudflare account here.
Configure the Cloudflare Zero Trust (optional)
TODO
- [x] Create the custom VCN (VPC)
- [x] Get the latest Ubuntu image automatically
- [x] Create the block volume for
/data(100GB) - [x] Attach the block volume to the instance
- [x] Create the instance on free tier (4 vCPU, 24GB memory)
- [x] Configure the instance and install VSCode Server with Cloud Init
- [x] Create automatically the SSH key pair
- [x] Mount and format the block volume on
/data - [x] Restrict SSH and VS Code port access
- [x] Configure backups of the block volume only
- [x] Configure Cloudflare Access (ZeroTrust) to secure the instance access
- [ ] Install dependencies/tools on the data volume to speed up the provisioning
- [ ] Create dynamically an Ansible Vault to save the sensitive data used by Ansible
- [ ] Encrypt the block volume with a KMS key
- [ ] Write the documentation for the manual steps (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure & Cloudflare accounts, etc.)
- [ ] Explain how to avoid the "Out of Host capacity" error on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure