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Tips for running Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi
Things you didn’t know, knew or did not care about until now.
After a successful reception of my previous article about building the Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi ( have a look if you want the fully automated build, code attached ). I have decided to follow up with few things I have learned and discovered since then to save your time and efforts and who knows, maybe even convince you to spin your own.
Temperature control
Raspberry Pi’s have a tendency to overheat — as every computing device — the more workload, the more heat generated. Unfortunately — all you get in the box is the board itself, but the thing which worked for me at the beginning was the generous placement of third party heat sinks which worked fine until I decided to add a bit of heavier applications to the pool.
After a bit of research, I’ve discovered the fan shims offered by pimoroni which suited my deployment and structure of the cluster, not requiring me to install additional separators and make the Pi tower even taller.
To manage the fans you can either reverse engineer code from my previous article or simply use it as it is and have everything done for you.
Fans are great, they definitely do the job especially when mixed with heatsinks although there’s another thing I’ve missed whilst counting on them too much and never paying attention to until I enabled coloured LED status on the mentioned shims. The heat goes up, therefore Pi’s on the bottom of the tower were cooking the ones on the top.
After placing the nodes horizontally, the temperature dropped down by up to 10 Celsius degree (!) without any additional changes.
Storage and life
Running Raspberry Pi from the memory card by definition may be asking for the problems. Luckily I haven’t experienced any issues…
