How Brandon Uses His Pi Cluster

Hi Chris and Mike,

I really appreciated the enthusiasm over my Raspberry Pi cluster a few episodes ago. I honestly didn't think it was a big deal, I guess I've been watching too much Jeff Geerling.

So the Pi cluster is 3 Pis, a single Pi 4 8GB model, and 2 Pi 3B+s. All three are powered over PoE with a small switch I keep in the cluster stack. OS+Workload-wise, they run Ubuntu with the K3s kubernetes system. I also have a 1TB HDD connected to the Pi 4, which is made available to the k8s pods via NFS.
Looks something like this https://imgur.com/a/nAi8vq9.

As to why, it suddenly became a job requirement for me to be able to learn Kubernetes very quickly in order to lead a team building and deploying a k8s workload. The typical wisdom of learning k8s is that you pay a cloud provider who have their own k8s platform and learn there, but as a bit of a hands-on man, I rejected this and built my own cluster out of the Pis I had laying around the house. I've always been a bit antsy with learning cloud tech, since the risk of me ending up with a massive bill is so non-zero that I'm not sure I'm willing to stomach it. I've also found that being able to just have a box in the house that I can hack on, blow up, tear down and start again and generally not be stressed about has made me more willing to experiment and build up an intuition about how the tech works.

I can report that my home k8s cluster was a big help in upskilling and I was successful in developing and deploying a mission critical k8s workload at my job.

Since then, I've found the cluster continuing to be useful for educational purposes, as well as a good way for me to trial new services for my lan, whether built by the community or my own projects. I can run a bunch at a time, and the stuff that works can be promoted to full time services, running on my beefy OpenMediaVault server. That way I can reduce the risk of breaking my existing configuration or losing data.

Definitely a fun project I'd recommend to any listeners with a few Pis laying around.

Also just want to say, it's been astounding to watch the show's 180 on blockchain and web3 tech. I left that initial episode from last year feeling pretty unhappy about general sentiment from the show, so it's been good to see a more nuanced take on the tech. The state of tech and the politics that intersect it have been pretty piss poor lately, so it's nice to see people with big ideas trying to create a better future, regardless of how likely it is to go as planned.

As always, thank you for the show,
Brandon