When the Raspberry PI first came out, I was thrilled at what the RPI Foundation was attempting. A small, single board computer that supported a graphical Linux distro! I know people working in third-world countries using them to translate the Bible, teach computer skills, and expose people to what a computer could do.
I have bought several PIs over the years and last year bought a CM4 with the RPI I/O board. My dream was to build a server cluster to further my Kubernetes learning. I was inspired by people like Jeff Geerling and wanted to support the RPI Foundation.
Then the supply shortage hit…
Watching the prices rise very quickly killed off any hope of building an RPI cluster. Now the RPI foundation is saying availability of the CM4 modules may improve in 2023 or 2024. :-(
This year I finally came to my senses and realized there was a much better way to build my cluster. I could buy a used Dell Optiplex computer all day off of Craigslist and eBay for about $100. Adding in an NVMe stick and bringing it up to 16 GB might cost another $100. Rinse, repeat three times.
Then I could load Proxmox on these computers and build a Proxmox cluster. Adding in another Dell Optiplex with TrueNAS on it, I could build VMs with shared storage (via NFS) and I could emulate what a corporate datacenter had!
Using this Proxmox cluster I could build a Kubernetes cluster with a huge amount of power and disk space compared to RPIs.
I had it all built and began learning as soon as the hardware arrived.
And still the availability of RPIs is almost non-existent. I do wish the RPI Foundation the best, but they seem to be effected by their own popularity.
Update: I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying the RPI. My needs have grown into more “server” use cases. This includes needing more power, more storage and getting away from ARM based computers. Plus, I am cheap/poor so the CPU power per dollar ratio is just too painful. I do have a always on RPI (RPI 3B) for PiHole and media serving which I don’t think I will ever change.
“So long and thanks for all the fish”.
Douglas Adams