octopik3s

renaming from raspberrypik3s

overview

with the announcement of the RaspberryPi-4B, i decided that it would be an inexpensive and fun way to learn Kubernetes by building a foureight node cluster, with Rancher's k3s, hence octopik3s (the website is currently down, however), or pik3s.

goals

• learn RaspberryPi
• learn Kubernetes
• fully automated CI/CD for cluster and for website
• create pretty graphs

hardware

what started as a budget build, turned into something...a lot more expensive.

• RaspberryPi 4
• RaspberryPi PoE Hat
• C4 Labs 8 Slot Cloudlet Cluster Case
• CoolerGuys dual 50mm usb fan
• Samsung USB 3.1 FIT Plus 128Gb
• Samsung MicroSDHC EVO Plus 32GB
• Tenda 9-port gigabit PoE switch TEG1009P-EI
  • (new model) Tenda 9-port gigabit PoE switch TEG1109P-8-102W

specs

• 32x Broadcom BCM2711 (ARM v8) 64-bit cores @ 1.5GHz
• 32GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM
• non-blocking gigabit ethernet interconnect
• 8:1 uplink oversubscription

software

when i started this project, my choices for a 64-bit o/s for arm64 were ubuntu and fedora; i prefer debian-based distros, ubuntu image.

Rancher's K3s was chosen for being a lightweight, fully compliant Kubernetes distribution.

• Ubuntu Server
• Lightweight Kubernetes k3s
• etcd
• cillium.io for CNI
  • installation on k3s