Five years of Raspberry Pi Clusters

I’ve been writing about running Docker on Raspberry Pi for 5 years now and things have got a lot easier than when I started back in the day. There’s now no need to patch the kernel, use a bespoke OS or even build Go and Docker from scratch.

My stack of 7 Raspberry PI Model 2s running Docker Swarm (2016)

Since my first blog post and printed article, I noticed that Raspberry Pi clusters were a hot topic.

They’ve only got even hotter as the technology got easier to use and the devices became more powerful.

One of my first tutorials was published in Linux User and Developer

• Docker Article in Linux magazine — March 2016

Back then we used “old Swarm” which was arguably more like Kubernetes with swappable orchestration and a remote API that could run containers. Load-balancing wasn’t built-in, and so we used Nginx to do that job.

I built out a special demo using kit from Pimoroni.com. Each LED lit up when a HTTP request came in.