ikaruswill

I used Ansible for the cluster in the article, PXE boot seems great but the learning curve is steep enough for me to put it off for the moment.

Thanks for the tip. I did consider Ebay, but at that point, I figured it was more trouble than it's worth if I bought them used. Ebay doesn't exactly have the best reputation.

The initial point was to build it just because, there was no real reason behind building it. But at this point, I've found quite a lot of use cases for it, specifically hosting web services for family and friends. In the process though, I've learnt to work under extreme resource/budget constraints and that alone has been invaluable imo.

What would you use then?

Thanks for reading! It's probably worth implementing it in the cloud using the free credits if hardware is prohibitively expensive, at least for the purposes of learning.

If you do intend to self-host some services in the longer term, the cost of running it on the cloud will catch up with the hardware cost in no time at all.

I actually have had a cluster of Raspberry Pi 1Bs before this current cluster. Though the specs are very much similar to a Zero W, the performance wasn't great.

I agree that it would cost much less, but I would also get much less utility out of it. At this point, the cluster is doing quite a lot, even the site itself is hosted on it.

My point here is that having room for future utility at not much additional cost, would be best.

Indeed, though at the point of building this cluster, "Endurance" microSD cards were not in the market yet, hence I didn't go for it.

You're absolutely right. I've running these SD cards for about 2 years now. I use log2ram to stream logs to a ramdisk and then sync that at regular intervals to disk, to extend the life of the SD cards.

Nope, the site has its persistent storage on an SSD shared via NFS across the cluster.

Yes the site is indeed hosted on the cluster.

Hello, original author here. I saw a bunch of traffic from Hacker News and decided to drop by.

Thanks for sharing it here! I'd be happy to answer any questions.