A Rational Approach to Raspberry Pi Clustering

RE: A Rational Approach to Raspberry Pi Clustering

Fred27 — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 13:08:27 GMT

Alex Ellis has done some interesting things running Kubernetes on Pi clusters over the years. I haven't followed what he's done that closely but I know he was using k3s recently.

https://blog.alexellis.io/test-drive-k3s-on-raspberry-pi/

RE: A Rational Approach to Raspberry Pi Clustering

shabaz — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 17:50:14 GMT

Any good use cases?

So far maybe the best one is as a compile server farm? It could be useful when building large software projects for Pi, where multiple cores can be used. I wouldn't know how to set that up - in old times, it could be done using gcc using the -j switch but it probably needed some setup/configuration somewhere.

As for other use-cases, the article was clutching at straws it seemed. There are better use-cases. One would be as test environment, because sometimes people want to simulate a scenario with multiple devices. Once I wanted to simulate a small business. To do that I 'borrowed' 25 laptops.. Today, that could have been done with 25 Pi's.

RE: A Rational Approach to Raspberry Pi Clustering

clem57 — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 17:16:43 GMT

Free colaboration software

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RE: A Rational Approach to Raspberry Pi Clustering

balearicdynamics — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 16:12:38 GMT

Hello Clem,

Kubernetes is the best, the fast, the powerful. So by my own nature, I am suspicious. Then I investigate. Then definitely I think – it is my personal vision – That it is too much too too too ... Why?

First of all, because it is open-source but the version for the Pi is a sort of reduced setting than the most powerful K8 installation that born and has been conceived to run on big machines and there it works best. I think that as the Pi in a reduced but not wrong vision is a Linux machine, you can also use if to run a virtualization server, but if you want a flexible and manageable system, this is not the right way. Different if you want to experiment.

Second, it runs only on Ubuntu, that it is an incredible – and under some points of view unacceptable – approach for a Linux Open Source project.

These two factors are sufficient to decide to find a more comfortable way, more tailored to work with the Raspberry Pi, and also easy to set-up and configure based on the needs. Many of the K8 features are not viable or has a very few sense to run on the Pi for a lot of reasons. So, I have built one following a different approach; I make a four nodes PiCluster machine that I can use in my real everyday work, with the needs a common user can solve. The setting may be a bit more complex, but there are more Pi-oriented options that give the possibility to configure the cluster just to do the right job. At an inexpensive cost.

You can find more in the details on this how-to (catched here and there on the net, trying to focus the point I wrote above).

https://we-are-borg.com/2020/03/25/picluster-how-to/