Walk-through — install Kubernetes to your Raspberry Pi in 15 minutes

Alex Ellis
8 min readMar 1, 2020

Here’s something you can do before work, with your morning coffee, or whilst waiting for dinner to cook of an evening. And there’s never been a better time to install Kubernetes to a Raspberry Pi, with the price-drop on the 2GB model — perfect for containers.

You can buy a single RPi and still have a lot of fun, here I bought 4x 2GB nodes

I’ll show you how to install Kubernetes to your Raspberry Pi in 15 minutes including monitoring and how to deploy containers.

Updates:

  • Dec 2020 — added cmdline.txt instructions for cgroups and ssh-copy-id
  • Jan 2021 — added multi-arch faas-cli publish command instead of faas-cli up to use new templates and Docker buildx
  • Mar 2021 — Raspbian is now Raspberry Pi OS

The bill of materials

I’ll keep this quite simple.

  • Raspberry Pi 4, with 2GB or 4GB RAM — the 2GB is the best value, 4GB is best if you don’t plan on doing clustering.
  • SD card — 32GB recommended, larger is up to you, but Kubernetes writes to disk a lot and could kill a card, so I tend to prefer buying more smaller cards.
  • Power supply — you need the official supply, I know it’s expensive, but that’s for a reason. Don’t be cheap because you’ll buy twice.

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