This blog post will show you how to create your own Serverless Raspberry Pi cluster with Docker and the OpenFaaS framework. People often ask me what they should do with their cluster and this application is perfect for the credit-card sized device – want more compute power? Scale by adding more RPis.
“Serverless” is a design pattern for event-driven architectures just like “bridge”, “facade”, “factory” and “cloud” are also abstract concepts – so is “serverless”.
Here’s my cluster for the blog post – with brass stand-offs used to separate each device.
What is Serverless and why does it matter to you?
As an industry we have some explaining to do regarding what the term “serverless” means. For the sake of this blog post let us assume that it is a new architectural pattern for event-driven architectures and that it lets you write tiny, reusable functions in whatever language you like. Read more on Serverless here.
Serverless functions can do anything, but usually work on a given input – such as an event from GitHub, Twitter, PayPal, Slack, your Jenkins CI pipeline – or in the case of a Raspberry Pi – maybe a real-world sensor input such as a PIR motion sensor, laser tripwire or even a temperature gauge.