It's been a while since I've posted about this project, and just wanted to give a little update.

After pursuing K8s for a while and microk8s I couldn't quite get anything useful working for me on the cluster.

After switching my focus to k3s and the brilliant set of tools called k3s-up (created by the magnificent Alex Ellis) I have been able to quickly and easily get the four nodes of my cluster up and running.

Hardware changes - I've completed the transition to USB booting for all nodes, getting rid of the SD Cards.

This has not only improved performance, it has also added more storage and improved reliability.

I've also exchanged one of the cheaper PoE HATs for an official Pi PoE HAT. The lower profile fits the cluster case much better, and removes the need to connect it via jumper wires. I've got one more to replace in due course, but I'm leaving the top one as-is, as it fits fine on the top node and also powers the cluster case fan.

My next goals are to set up some useful instances on the cluster, such as Openfaas, a database instance and start packaging some of my own apps into containers for deployment on here such as an AI assisted smarthome App I'm working on, and also some AI driven image recognition software.

Hardware wise, I'd like to switch out one of the 2Gb Pi nodes for my Tinkerboard, explore Netbooting the nodes instead of USB booting, and finally picking up a second case and adding another four nodes to it. The ending result would be an 8 node cluster with two master nodes for HA, and 6 worker nodes.