The original Raspberry Pi was conceived to attract students to the fine art of coding. But over the years, modern RPi systems have evolved enough to fit a variety of use cases, ranging from emulation systems and media servers to full-fledged laptops and computing clusters. In fact, here are some reasons you should consider building a Raspberry Pi cluster as your next project.

4 Solid energy efficiency

Electricity bills won’t hurt your wallet again

A cluster made from old PCs and server-grade hardware seems like a great idea until your energy bill starts to hit the red zone. Unlike Raspberry Pi systems and their efficient ARM architecture, clusters made from x86 devices are energy gluttons and can single-handedly blow a hole in your wallet with their sky-high wattage.

Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi boards barely add to your energy consumption, even with multiple SBCs running inside a cluster. Plus, since they don’t require a lot of juice, you can easily hook your Raspberry Pi-flavored cluster up to an inexpensive UPS and run your server workloads during blackouts.

3 Small footprint

You don’t need to dedicate a room to your cluster

The small form factor of the Raspberry Pi family comes in handy when you’re trying to build a computing cluster. Rather than occupying several racks, a Raspberry Pi cluster has a tiny footprint, especially once you stack them on top of each other.

Even if you were to use larger mainline RPi boards in your cluster, you won’t have to clear out extra space to accommodate it in your home lab. Throw in some PoE cables, and you won’t have to worry about cable management when building your Raspberry Pi server.

2 Great for tinkering with high-availability setups

And MPI-based parallel processing

Being able to experiment with high-availability servers can be indispensable when you’re pursuing a career in networking, DevOps, or sysadmin branches. Since you can grab the mid-range Raspberry Pi models without draining your wallet, they’re a great way to familiarize yourself with load balancing, parallel processing, and other advanced branches of computing.

Not to mention, the Raspberry Pi series has tons of documentation, guides, and tutorials centered around it. So, you won’t have any issues assembling a cluster even if you’re a complete beginner to the server ecosystem.

1 Terrific compatibility with containerization tools

Not even the ARM architecture can hold your cluster back!

Although the Raspberry Pi series isn’t powerful enough to run a fleet of virtual machines, the newer models are more than capable of hosting dozens, if not hundreds, of containers. For casual home labbers, you can easily put together a Docker Swarm cluster with a couple of RPi units to manage your favorite services.

But if you’re ready to plunge into the self-hosting rabbit hole, you can assemble a robust Kubernetes cluster with your Raspberry Pi SBCs. As if that’s not enough, these ARM-based systems pair exceedingly well with Dockage, Cockpit, Uptime Kuma, Helm charts, ntopng, and a host of other essential containerization utilities.

Can a Raspberry Pi cluster replace your home server?

Although feeble Raspberry Pi boards can’t hold a candle to the sheer horsepower of x86 clusters, there are a couple of situations where it makes sense to go with the former. If your workloads primarily involve containers, you’ll have a swell time with a Raspberry Pi cluster. Likewise, server projects that involve extensive use of sensors, I2C modules, and MIPI devices are easier to handle with a Raspberry Pi cluster.