Single-Board Computers continue to receive performance upgrades with each passing year, with modern SBCs being versatile enough to run a handful of projects. This includes the uber-popular Raspberry Pi family that, despite featuring the Arm design, can bring cool, practical, and downright quirky ideas into existence.

But what about using these adorably-sized boards to run server projects? While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Raspberry Pi family can outperform x86 mini-PCs, they work surprisingly well as server nodes – and I say that as someone who uses a Raspberry Pi 5 to self-host essential services that I otherwise wouldn’t deploy on my experimental workstation.

Containers pair well with the Raspberry Pi

Docker/Podman or containerization platforms: Pick your poison

Despite lacking in sheer horsepower, the Raspberry Pi boards can run self-hosted services without breaking a sweat – and it’s all thanks to containers. Although they package entire apps and their dependencies inside isolated environments, containers use the underlying kernel of the operating system, significantly reducing the processing overhead. And it's thanks to their lightweight design that your average Raspberry Pi can run a few containers without buckling under pressure.

Heck, I use my Raspberry Pi as an all-in-one monitoring server that not only tracks the uptime of my server rigs and self-hosted arsenal, but also sends alerts when things go south. I use a Docker setup that runs on good ol’ Raspberry Pi OS, but Podman works better when you need a daemonless container runtime that can group co-dependent services inside pods.

Or, you could go for containerization platforms instead and save yourself the hassle of dealing with terminal commands. The Raspberry Pi family supports most of the popular ones, ranging from bare-metal setups like UmbrelOS and YunoHost to CasaOS, Cosmos, Runtipi, and other platforms that run on top of an existing OS. In addition to simplifying container deployment and management, these platforms also bring automated backups, SSO support, SSL certificate management, and other features to the table.

Spare Raspberry Pis can be repurposed into a Kubernetes cluster

Your very own HA cluster, squeezed into pint-sized boards

Despite being one of the most popular container orchestration tools out there, Kubernetes doesn’t require a lot of computing resources. As such, you can even deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pi boards and enjoy all the high availability and auto-scaling provisions offered by the platform. I’ve been using a K8s cluster built from a combination of Raspberry Pi and rival Arm boards, and it works surprisingly well.

While it may seem somewhat excessive for a home lab, a Raspberry Pi-flavored cluster is a great way to hone your DevOps skills without shelling out too much money on expensive hardware. Likewise, if you’re planning to tinker with web development projects involving containerized websites, reverse proxies, and DNS servers, a Kubernetes cluster is a great way to add extra fault tolerance to the setup.

For folks who want Kubernetes’ orchestration features without the platform’s steep learning curve, you can also run a Docker Swarm setup. While you lose out on auto-scaling, K8s-oriented community tools, and compatibility with multiple container runtimes, Swarm is a great way to deploy a high-availability cluster centered around Docker containers.

Or you can build a budget-friendly NAS

A NASberry Pi, if you will

Before I begin, let me add that a Raspberry Pi isn’t a substitute for a proper storage server, and you’re better off investing in a pre-built NAS chassis for hardcore backup tasks. But if you just want to deploy a simple file-sharing server or a secondary data archival rig for your main NAS, a Raspberry Pi won’t let you down.

The mainline Raspberry Pi boards support OpenMediaVault, a powerful Debian-based distro that includes most of the essential NAS utilities without requiring a lot of processing horsepower. If you’ve got a high-end Raspberry Pi board, you can also arm your OMV instance with a handful of plugins, including some that turn it into a Docker-based container-hosting workstation. Throw in Tailscale, and you can essentially turn your NASberry Pi into a remote NAS, making it highly useful for a 3-2-1 backup setup.

You might want to stay away from VMs, though

These SBCs aren’t powerful enough for virtualization projects

Although the Raspberry Pi works exceedingly well with containerized services, the situation becomes wildly different once you throw virtual machines into the mix. You could get away with a CLI VM (or maybe two on the expensive variants) when running KVM on your Raspberry Pi, but the performance will be far from optimal. Source: My nerd self who tried deploying a community-created Arm version of Proxmox on an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 and regretted it later.

Don’t get me wrong, a Raspberry Pi can work as a reliable home server node. But once you start dabbling in VM-heavy workloads or tasks that require the superior OS and package compatibility of an x86 CPU, it might be a good idea to look into a budget-friendly mini-PC.