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Comment by sdan | Hacker News Reader

I can attest to RPI i/o speed: its horrible. Combined with the fact that I have to build Docker containers on the RPIs themselves(because of arm), its more of a hassle than a cool add-on (to be clear I'm running Docker Swarm in a way that isn't too different from the setup of OP).

Only reason I can see RPIs in kubernetes is if you're exclusively using ARM everywhere and/or are running some distributed cluster among different locations (like Chick-fil-a).

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You can actually build ARM images on your x64 machine using newer versions of Docker with BuildKit built into it. I think it uses QEMU under the hood.

I recently did this at work, using a single Dockerfile to built multi-arch images for ARM and x64 - it's pretty nice!

Previously I've done this, but found it takes a bunch of time. I'll give it another go, though and see how it goes!

Is there an RPi alternative (ie. similar size, form etc.) that has better IO/Network speed?

I used RPis for my robot (https://sendc.at/dl/Kjjbt3dij6T733YgWsyv3p3Vv5GPGKO1q5IEFStV...) with daughter boards for motor control) and they wre pretty convenient, but never really considered running anything server-like on them because they have reportedly woeful network performance.

I have this https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram/

It's pretty powerful for the cost and has no fan etc. Arm64.

Those look sweet, thanks!

The pi 4 has gigabit ethernet. I'm not sure why you'd think it has "woeful network performance". The 3B+ could only do a couple hundred megabit, which was somewhat mediocre, though.

If they've fixed it with the 4 then that's great, ISTR in previous versions the Ethernet was backed by the shared USB controller (https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/45130/why-do...), hence my question.

The shared USB controller wasn't the issue, the lack of USB 3 was.

OK, "the use of a backing bus that wasn't fast enough".

You don't have to build on the RPi's themselves: https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/#build-mu...

Don't build stuff on the Pi! You just need to set up a cross-compiler toolchain and compile it on your much more capable AMD64 machine.

The RPi 4 can saturate gigabit with ease, it's in a different league compared to the RPi 3 and lower, avoid those like the plague.

This is not much of a problem if you switch out of the 32bit Raspbian. Most images will work out of the box on ARM64

I use drone.io to build all my arm images for my pi cluster.

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