David Guill built a 40-node Raspberry Pi Cluster that was intended to be part of his MSCE thesis. Interns at DataStax built a multi-datacenter, 32 nodes Cassenda fault-tolerance demo, complete with a big red button to simulate the failure of an entire datacenter. Not long after the first Raspberry Pi was released in 2012, several set out to build them into low-cost clusters, often for research and testing purposes. It's even used administratively in production environments.
The Raspberry Pi is no longer just a low-cost platform for students to learn computing, it's now a legitimate research and development platform that's used for IoT, networking, distributed systems, and software development.
This guide discusses everything needed to build a simple, scalable, and fully binary compatible Raspberry Pi cluster using QEMU, Docker, Docker Compose, and Ansible.
