13 Aug 2025
It's been a while since my last post but honestly there hasn't been any truly huge events that would be appropriate to share here. I don't especially want to fill up this blog with such factoids as "we bought a new mop". So instead I'll mention something that I am working on, still very early stages, in the hope that shouting about it on here will guilt me into definitely finishing it.
Around a month back I decided that I wanted to have my own Kubernetes cluster at home, just for playing around with. The component list I came up with was:
- I got a good deal on some Raspberry Pi 5s with 8GB RAM, more than good enough for what I wanted.
- Just to be careful I also bought the official Raspberry Pi 5 Active Cooler.
- I had a few thoughts about how best to power my cluster but just decided to buy a used TP-Link TL-SG1005P 5-Port Unmanaged GbE PoE+ Switch.
- The Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't support Power over Ethernet natively so I'd need each Pi to also have a hat, specifically I went for the Waveshare PoE M.2 HAT+ (B) for Raspberry Pi 5. That would give me PoE, an M.2 slot for SSD storage and is also compatible the the Active Cooler I'd already bought.
- To put everything into a nice enclosure I bought the C4 Labs Cluster Case.
So far I've only constructed one of the Pi cluster nodes, I needed to use some extra stand-off nuts to get it to screw onto the mounting plate, due to the push-grips on the active cooler protuding from the bottom a little bit longer than I wanted. Once I have them all constructed the way I want I also need to buy the M.2 SSDs to be the actual storage and a micro SD card to use for installing the operating system on to each node. Once that is all done I then need to figure out how I'm actually going to install Kubernetes on each node. Hopefully it doesn't start to feel like I'm just doing my job at home because that really wasn't my intention!
I initially had the idea to put a Rasperry Pi Kubernetes cluster to validate some work I am doing on Luncher Kubernetes Engine 1, but I now don't think there is as much of an urgent need to do that. I may still use LKE1 as the method for installing and managing Kubernetes on this cluster, but I suspect kubespray would be significantly easier.
Well tomorrow I am off work and have a trip to a lido to look forward to, so I should probably stop this post here. When I complete my setup I'll make another with photos, diagrams and GitHub repos - all that good stuff!