Jeff Geerling have always tempted of more hardware-oriented hacking. Among those, pulling out one of Raspberry Pi B+/A+ or Arduino UNO is the favorite one. He considers them as a raw of modern computers as you only require to touch the silicone chips and pins to use the devices. With the help of raspberry pi, and a Node.js/Express app, which includes usage of Pi and Arduino to build a temperature monitoring network, he is able to build a cluster of Raspberry Pi. He named this cluster as DRAMBLE or say a ‘bramble’ of Raspberry Pi running Drupal 8. In this project, he is also using three technologies, The Raspberry Pi 2 model B, Ansible, and Drupal
Jeff have a considerable knowledge about Ansible as he is giving presentations on managing infrastructure with Ansible in the past couple years. He has also performed various testing on Ansible in the course of writing “Ansible for DevOps” But here, he has done testing on a ‘local datacenter’ as all networking is local and conferences don’t always have the most stable networking, so all infrastructure testing is on ‘local cloud’.
Jeff has also shared his experience which he learned while Building the Pi-based infrastructure including small-scale computing, efficient use of resources, benchmarking, and also how Drupal 8 differs from Drupal 7 in terms of multi-server deployment and high-availability/high-performance configurations.
Further, he has also learned how to control RGB LEDs with the Pi and make an LED ‘breathe’ Drupal blue, that’s sound interesting. He has completely understood the importance of a clean power supply and decent wiring and accessories for a stable Pi cluster and found ways to measure power consumption and conserve energy when using Raspberry Pi. He too has explored incredible variety of quality/performance in cheap micro SD and SD cards. He do know now how to use Redis for caching in Drupal 8 and analyzed the performance of MySQL in a slow I/O, high latency environment with the help of USB or internal storage. And this is not the end
There are various limiting factors in this infrastructure in low cost computers. He has also benchmarked the heck out of the infrastructure. For an instance, on-the-fly gzip actually harms performance in general when CPU isn’t that fast and Redis caching gives an immediate 15% speedup for Drupal 8. Further different micro SD cards deliver order-of-magnitude speedups. And yes Drupal 8 is sort of slow
Jeff has already a little cluster of Raspberry Pi that uses half the power of a standard light bulb and since the servers are slower and have different performance considerations than typical modern cloud-based infrastructure, it helps to expose certain performance-related flaws
Creativity is the platform from where you can, not only explore the world but bring it to a next level. The details of the project and video is available on the website.
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