Project Duration
May 17 2023 - Aug 29 2023
Overview
This project was made in order to help service my friend’s Minecraft server when we play together. What initially started as a convenance turned into a passion project overnight.
When looking at how to spin up a Minecraft server, cost was a big thing for us, since we don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for 3 weeks worth of playtime. That was where I began looking around for cheaper, more secure options. That’s where I stumbled across Oracle and their fairly generous cloud offerings.
After doing some research on their instances, I was off to the races to get a basic Minecraft server going. It took some iterations, but I was able to get a server that was reasonably fast, and costed next to nothing to manage. Upon getting to this point, I wanted to automate the original process so that if I ever wanted to make a new server, or just to mess around on my own multiplayer server, I could do it easily.
Fun fact: There was two iterations of this project! The first one, wasn’t even on Oracle; it was on GCP! If you’re feeling adventurous, you can see that module here
After some time messing around with the configs, I realized something. I could use what I do at work to get these instances managed! Then, I put two and two together on how I could manage the instance with my DevOps knowledge, the rest became history.
Features
- Automate spinning up/down the environment via Terraform
- No other external tool needed (used TF to manage, bash to run scripts, and systemd to run minecraft service)
- Can easily set up whitelists for server
- Mod support via Forge
- And more!