k3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that runs well on limited hardware (such as ARM processors), so it's perfect for building small clusters. It also happens to be easy to install and use.

Setting up the cluster

In k3s, the first node is the control plane, and it's where the Kubernetes API is hosted. This is the node that manages the other nodes in the cluster.

Managing the cluster

Monitoring the cluster

As you can see from the images above, the cpu and memory usage is very low. Even though I am hosting this blog on my PI cluster, with a few mariadb database servers, and a few web servers, the cpu usage is only about 6%, and the memory usage is under 4GB. So I realized that I didn't need a Raspberry Pi with 8GB of RAM, and a Raspberry Pi with 4GB of RAM, would have been enough. One thing is for sure, you definitely don't need to buy a Raspberry Pi 5 computer with 16GB of RAM.

Cloudflare Tunnels

Cloudflare Tunnels are a great way to connect your cluster to the internet.