I'm sorry that you experienced that. I work on the team responsible for the instance agent. We're aware that there have been performance and resource issues with it, and are always trying to drive down resource usage. If you're okay without any metrics for the instance, you can always completely disable the agent.
Over the last several months we've migrated most things to Go (which was always the ultimate goal), and introduced a plug-in based approach with it. Recently we enabled a feature to allow you to enable or disable plug-ins used by the instance agent dynamically.
On the Free Tier with your VMs it's currently impossible to get a cluster (with say MicroK8s or K3s) up and running and responding to requests. Either the free resources limits quoted are wrong or something else is afoot.
There shouldn't be any difference between the quoted resource limits and reality, if there is something is definitely wrong, and I want to get that identified and resolved.
I haven't had time / opportunity to look in to Microk8s or k3s. Would it be straightforward for me to replicate what you were seeing? Just follow a simple online tutorial?
Note: We built/build OCI with security in mind, and encouraging a more secure-by-default approach. All of the standard platform images come with the firewall enabled and locked down, and the default network security groups are locked down too. One example brought up in the earlier days of the platform build out were all those times you see people's MongoDB accidentally exposed. Obviously this is a total guess as to what you ran in to, it's definitely something that trips up customers.
I did open ports I thought I needed for K3s and MicroK8s but I may not have caught all of them. Any simple online tutorial should get you to where I was!
It'd be really great to show developers they have a place they can make toy clusters without having to worry about gotcha charges.
Over the last several months we've migrated most things to Go (which was always the ultimate goal), and introduced a plug-in based approach with it. Recently we enabled a feature to allow you to enable or disable plug-ins used by the instance agent dynamically.