storytime.ivysaur.me

At the time of writing, Oracle Cloud have a highly generous ‘always free’ tier that includes 4 Ampere Altra vCPUs (the same ARM Neoverse N1 core used in Graviton 2), 24 GB RAM, 200GB block device, and 2x IPv4 addresses. It can be used to create one large VM or 4x small ones. The only available aarch64 templates are for Enterprise Linux distros (Oracle Linux or CentOS). However it is possible to convert a running VM from CentOS to Debian.

ZFS is a hybrid filesystem and volume manager system that is quite popular recently but has some important and unexpected problems. It has many good features, which are probably why it is used: snapshots (with send/receive suppport), checksumming, RAID of some kind (with scrubbing support), deduplication, compression, and encryption. But ZFS also has a lot of downsides. It is not the only way to achieve those features on Linux, and there are better alternatives.