Raspberry PIs

Affordable. Tiny. Useful.

You can learn a lot using a raspberry pi.

History

I wanted to learn how to use and manage a Kubernetes cluster long time ago. My first idea? Buy a Raspberry PI cluster.

A long time has passed since that moment and I am working on this project back again. I have:

• 1 raspberry pi 4 model b
• 4 raspberry pi 3 model b

Learnings

• It is definitely challenging working with devices of restricted resources
• My ansible-playbook recipes doesn’t work all the time
• kubernetes got more complicated to run on this devices
• my rpis 3 can’t seem to run ubuntu server. Didn’t debug much, but had to install raspberry pi os without desktop

Usage

So my idea was to have the k8s cluster and run a bunch of applications from the reddit selfhosted thread.

Final thoughts

Even though I wanted to make this work, I realized that k8s may not be the best route for the computing power that this devices provide. I finally settled with:

• docker
• docker-compose with local builds for images that required it
• traefik and a proxy.pacon my computer and phone

Maybe future #TODOS:

• create an overlay network between devices
• point traefik to other devices in the network

Next story is going to be about my own Kubernetes cluster on the cloud…