This section will guide you through the whole process of running kubernetes cluster on a Raspberry Pi machines.

- Why so complicated?

Even though go-home doesn’t require the whole cluster and can be executed in Docker or by running a standalone binary, it was designed with k8s in mind. All 3rd-party applications will be supplemented with Helm charts, made them very easy to deploy.

In addition, k8s is very robust orchestrator and allows to easily balance your go-home installation. And clustering is the main idea behind go-home.

If you don’t want to run RPi cluster, you still can leverage most of the provided Charts by running minikube.

- I don’t want to run k8s, where can I find Docker images?

All components and 3rd-party apps will have at least two versions: arm32v6/v7 and amd64. If application’s authors are not supporting arm out of the box, images are going to be published on go-home hub.

Please refer to particular application’s documentation for details how to run it.

- Ok, k8s sounds cool, what do I need?

You’ll need at least 3 RPi, model B is better, 1 SD card and USB sticks for every node in your cluster. You still can run everything on regular SD cards, but in terms of data-safety USB is much better. Not to mention that 32GB USB is cheaper than 16GB SD card nowadays.

WARN Make sure that your USB drive is 3.0. "Samsung 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive Fit (MUF-32BB/AM)" showed a very good results.

- OMG, there’s like ten thousand steps?!

Yes, unfortunately initial setup will take probably 3-4 hrs of your time.