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A Swarm of Pis

In general, I try to keep my posts written in a way that non-tech people can follow along. This one I’m probably going to go a bit deep.

This is my Raspberry Pi cluster. They’re running a Docker swarm. Docker is a software that allows computers to run programs in a sort of jail where they cannot interact with things outside of their container unless specifically allowed to do so. Since these are running Docker in a swarm mode, they can move applications from one raspberry pi to another in order to balance the workload amongst all of them.

Here’s a graphic that shows the 4 Raspberry Pis and the software running on each one.

Raspberry Pis are great little computers for projects, but they’re a bit unreliable for storage. So last week I finally got them working with saving all of the data for these containerized programs onto my network storage. It’s using NFS, and while it should have been easy to set up, it was a pain. Now, things are pretty well set up that if one of the Raspberry Pis goes down, all of the programs running on it should just migrate over to a different Raspberry Pi.

Now I just need to learn about more cool software packages to run on these.

Cool Stuff • January 17, 2022

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