Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
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Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#2Super fun that you have more worker nodes than websites lol
Neat to see Docker Swarm in use. Don’t hear much about it since K8s took over.
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#3Super fun that you have more worker nodes than websites lol Neat to see Docker Swarm in use. Don’t hear much about it since K8s took over.
I mean in all honesty running docker swarm instead of k3s or k8s seems ... i dunno, lol, i've slowly moved away from using docker even on my single hosts i run podman now instead, i like using systemd for containers :S
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#4I have some Raspberry Pis that I self host stuff on. Gitlab on one, Runtipi on another, and pi-hole + Nginx + a game I made on a third. Some of it is publicly accessible on my own domains, but the only traffic I actually get is from myself.
I connect my Pis to my WiFi router and I've struggled with the adapters, so a POE switch might be interesting. I should containerize stuff, but I enjoy running it directly as well. I need to figure out backups some day.
The biggest issue I've had is that I've lost 3 SD cards in 6 years. Twice due to power failure, and once to heavy disk writes. I can't stand randomly losing stuff and having to re-setup a pi, so I switched to booting from USB SSDs. I haven't had an issue since. The cost is a bit obnoxious since I don't trust a cheap drives, but the perceived peace of mind is nice.
Has anyone else had this issues with losing SD cards while self hosting on Pis?
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#5I have some Raspberry Pis that I self host stuff on. Gitlab on one, Runtipi on another, and pi-hole + Nginx + a game I made on a third. Some of it is publicly accessible on my own domains, but the only traffic I actually get is from myself. I connect my Pis to my WiFi router and I've struggled with the adapters, so a POE switch might be interesting. I should containerize stuff, but I enjoy running it directly as well…
As to your direct question: I used some Pis for TV dashboards at work and had some random bit flips on the SD card and corrupted files for the dashboards. It may be "rare," but seems inevitable on a long enough timeline. For toy projects where you can re-image the SD card it's alright, but even for my trivial personal projects it made me uneasy.
100% to backups. I know we all put off doing it, but you'll rest a lot easier, even with personal data you don't think you care about. It's not only about a hardware failure, but even a fluke sysadmin error where you accidentally nuke something. I'd recommend getting a account for Backblaze B2, and setting up restic on each Pi to at least daily backup the data directories and stuff you care about. For your Gitlab it's a bit less risky since presumably you also have a clone of each repo on some other machine.
I love that people are building small datacenters out of Pis. I haven't done the math as far as TCO, but instead of multiple Pis for self-hosting, I have a lonely secondhand Dell Precision with an old 8th gen Intel CPU (6C/12T), 64GB of RAM, and several TB of NVMe plus some spinning rust for the long term stuff. It's just a crazy amount of horsepower. Most trusted workloads run as containers, and my other experiments can run as VMs, and I have capacity in all the right places (I need disk and RAM more than CPU). Not as exciting as building a cluster, but I have the excess capacity to spin up multiple VMs on that one machine, if I want to play with that. It can get very Inception-like, what if I'm running VMs in KubeVirt on top of Kubernetes that is running on a cluster of VMs that are ultimately on a single machine, but while delegating whatever extra /64 IPv6 prefixes Comcast gave me to each of the bottom-layer VMs so that each pod still gets a globally routable IPv6 address. Cool times for the homelab stuff, and helped me understand things like Kubernetes and IPv6 to a much greater depth.
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#6For fun is okay, but you can buy a single computer more powerful than those 4x Pi for 500 bucks. Pi has stopped being cost effective a long while ago.
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#7For fun is okay, but you can buy a single computer more powerful than those 4x Pi for 500 bucks. Pi has stopped being cost effective a long while ago.
And know that virtually 100% of software will run on it, rather than having to hope there's an ARM build of it (which most major FOSS software does have, but there's still that slice that doesn't)
And even if you want to experiment with multi-node HA stuff, I personally prefer to do that with VMs than wrangling actual physical machines
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#8I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch.
Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month (€0.35/kWh)
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#9I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch. Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month…
From my experience, being comfortable with networks and systems outside the cloud is a valuable skill that not a ton of people possess. It may be surprising to some of you, but there is an entire generation of syadmin/devops that have never touched a switch or a bare metal server.
Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster
#10Super fun that you have more worker nodes than websites lol Neat to see Docker Swarm in use. Don’t hear much about it since K8s took over.
Industry-wise Docker Swarm is somewhere between "on life support" and "shambling corpse" and has been for a while.
I'd say for at least as long as since the Mirantis acquisition in 2019.