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

• Create the custom VCN (VPC)
• Get the latest Ubuntu image automatically
• Create the block volume for /data (100GB)
• Attach the block volume to the instance
• Create the instance on free tier (4 vCPU, 24GB memory)
• Configure the instance and install VSCode Server with Cloud Init
• Create automatically the SSH key pair
• Mount and format the block volume on /data
• Restrict SSH and VS Code port access
• Configure backups of the block volume only
• 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

Known issues

• [bug] Optional dependencies install are executed in parallel and can fail (dpkg lock) (#11)
• [bug] Inconsistent mounting of the /data volume (#12)
• [bug] Interactive terminal during Ansible run due to the SSH Host to allow (#13)