How a database capacity problem masqueraded as a subscription issue, why async Celery workers were quietly leaking connections, and the three-layer fix that stopped it from coming back.
A real-world consulting story about auditing an oversized production server, reducing infrastructure costs by nearly 20×, and safely migrating a live Django/PostgreSQL system while handling security, data, scheduling, and rebranding risks.
Most "free tier" cloud offerings give you a toy — barely enough memory to boot, and a clock ticking toward a bill. Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is the outlier: it hands you a genuinely usable Arm server with 2 CPUs, 12 GB of RAM, and 200 GB of storage, free indefinitely. That's enough to run a real application stack — a backend, a database, a reverse proxy — not just a "hello world."