The Raspberry Pi mini computer was built for learning and experimentation. But since 2012, the "raspberry" has become much more powerful and functional. The board is used not only for education, but also for creating desktop PCs, media centers, smart TVs, players, retro consoles, private clouds and other purposes.
Now new cases have appeared, and not from third-party developers, but from the creators of the mini-PC themselves - the Raspberry Pi Foundation - and their hosting company Mythic Beasts. This provider maintains the Malinka website and blog.
Cluster of 18 Raspberry Pi 4. Source:
Last summer, the developers from the Raspberry Pi Foundation decided to create their own server for their site and successfully completed the plan. To do this, they assembled a cluster of 18 fourth-generation Raspberries with a 1,5 GHz quad-core processor and 4 GB of RAM.
14 boards were used as dynamic LAMP servers (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Two boards acted as static Apache servers, and two more served as memcache-based memory storage. The new server was configured to work with the company's website and moved to the Mythic Beasts data center.
Raspberry Pi 4. Source:
The company gradually moved traffic from "normal" hosting to the new Raspberry Pi hosting. Everything went well, the equipment survived. The only trouble is the failure of Cloudflare, lasted two hours. There were no more crashes. The hosting worked without any problems for a month, after which the company's website was returned to the usual virtual environment. The main goal is to prove that the server is operational and can withstand a high load (over ten million unique visitors per day).
Opening hosting on Raspberry Pi to everyone
In June 2020, Raspberry Pi Foundation partner, hosting provider Mythic Beasts, . Namely - hosting based on "raspberries" of the fourth generation for everyone. And this is not just an experiment, but a commercial offer, moreover, according to the hosting provider, it is quite profitable. The company said that the Raspberry Pi 4-based server is not only faster, but also much cheaper than AWS's a1.large and m6g.medium instances.
The proposal has one significant drawback - instead of HDD or SSD, SD memory cards are used here. This is not the most reliable medium, and when a card fails, it takes time to replace and configure it.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation proposes to solve this problem by including spare mini PCs in the cluster. If the card of one of the "raspberries" fails, a backup device with a working card is activated. Another option is to buy "hi endurance SD-card" drives. The cost of such a drive is about $25 for 128 GB.
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Source: habr.com