Prerequisites for K3s on Oracle Cloud

flowchart LR
    subgraph Accounts["Cloud Accounts"]
        OCI[OCI Account<br/>Always Free]
        CF[Cloudflare<br/>DNS Zone]
        GH[GitHub<br/>Repository]
    end

    subgraph Tools["Local Tools"]
        TF[Terraform]
        KU[kubectl]
        SSH[SSH Client]
    end

    subgraph Cluster["K3s Cluster"]
        K3s((Deployed<br/>Cluster))
    end

    OCI --> K3s
    CF --> K3s
    GH --> K3s
    TF --> K3s
    KU -.->|manage| K3s
    SSH -.->|access| K3s

Cloud Accounts

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

An OCI account with Always Free tier eligibility is required. You need availability for Ampere A1 Compute instances in your region. US-Ashburn-1 and EU-Frankfurt-1 typically have better availability.

Required credentials:

• Tenancy OCID
• User OCID
• API Key fingerprint
• Private key file (.pem)

Cloudflare

A domain managed by Cloudflare is required for DNS and TLS certificate automation. Create an API Token with Zone.DNS Edit permissions. This token is used by External DNS to create A records and by Cert Manager for HTTP-01 challenges.

GitHub

Fork this repository to your account. Create a Personal Access Token (Classic) with repo and read:packages scopes. This allows Argo CD to pull configuration from your private repository and pull container images from GHCR.

Local Tools

Terraform

Version 1.5.0 or higher. Used to provision OCI infrastructure and generate Kubernetes manifests.

Installation Guide

OCI CLI

Optional but recommended for validating credentials and checking service limits.

Installation Guide

kubectl

Required for interacting with the cluster after deployment.

Installation Guide

SSH Client

Standard OpenSSH client, pre-installed on macOS and Linux.