The cloud is over-engineered and over-priced for personal projects and small groups. If you're a larger company and want high-availability and speed globally, then you're probably wanting a cloud provider nowadays unless you're really wanting to manage hardware yourself.
Setting up your own website for fun or something for your local business obviously doesn't need a fancy Kubernetes setup in EKS. Hell, even a moderate business could be fine if you're not expecting usage spikes or latency issues (although you'd probably want more than a repurposed desktop).
I'd have a slightly different take: managing things in-house is going to be cheaper if you have a competent team to do it. The existence of the cloud as a crucial infrastructure is because it is hard to come up with competent IT and sysadmin people. The market is offer-driven now. IT staff could help the company save money on AWS hosting but it could also be used in more crucial and profitable endeavour and this is what is happening.
I see it at the 2 organization I am working at: one is a startup which does have a single, overworked "hardware guy" who sets up the critical infra of the company. His highest priority is to maintain the machine with private information that we want to host internally for strategic reasons. We calculated that having him install a few machines for hosting our dev team data was the cheapest but after 3 months of wait, we opted out for a more expensive, but immediately available, cloud option. We could have hired a second one but our HR department is already having a hard time finding candidates for out crucial missions.
On the non-profits I am working on, there is a strong openness/open-hardware spirit. Yet I am basically the only IT guy there. I often joke they should ditch their Microsoft, Office and Google based tools, and I could help them do it, but I prefer to work on the actual open hardware research projects they are funding. And I think I am right in my priorities.
So yes, the Cloud is overpriced, but it is a convenience. Know what you pay for, know you could save money there and it may at some point be reasonable to do so. In the end that's a resource allocation problem: human time vs money.
How many companies need such a scale, but are not able to provide it inhouse for less money?
Everyone wants to be Netflix, but 99% of companies don't even need close to that amount of scalability. I'd argue, a significant part of projects could be run on a raspberry pi, if they'd be engineered properly.
Thanks, that looks like something I might have to try. :) Myself, over the network, I still don't do filesystem level incremental backups, sticking to either directories or virtual machine snapshots (both of which have their shortcomings).
I've been hearing about ZFS and its beneficial features for years now, but mainstream Linux installers don't seem to support it, and I can't be bothered to switch filesystems after installing.
Out of curiosity - can anyone tell, what might be blocking them?
Edit: answering my own question: legal issues. Licenses "potentially aren't compatible".
Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel. ZoL is a project funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a native Linux kernel module for its massive storage requirements and super computers.
Apart from the license incompatibility (which doesn't stop it from being used by distros, as Ubuntu has shown): While it's a fantastic filesystem for servers, it is also resource hungry and not suitable for small or portable systems.
This looks pretty cool. I'd also recommend Caddy, which is a very nice minimal web server that's designed for scalability. It's what I use at my home setup, but I should have a look at this one too.
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That's impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
Optimized libraries
I know that Raspberry Pi has "WiringPi" (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got "WiringOP" (I haven't tried it, don't know if it works well). I don't know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you'd have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you'd be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).
Antenna socket
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you'd connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
If power consumption isn't the be all end all concern for you, there is a lot to be said for the ability of x86 to boot into just about anything. You still don't get that with ARM.
No one would want to buy this to use with high-demanding applications, but for hobbies and trivial stuff. With that said, even a Orange pi zero 3 is "better" than both Rpi 5 and the n100.
At the ever increasing cost of the pi and how limiting it is, the n100 is a no brainer.
Depends on the use case I guess.I prefer to have an ARM based SBC to play with (rather than an Intel based box) to test different Linux distributions and BSD without GUI.
Pi power consumption is going up too. And x86 keeps coming down. Idle power draw the pi wins you'd get 2x longer idle. But under load if you compared the workoutput to wattage I bet it's pretty close.
It's closer than it once was. But a Pi 5 running at full pelt is still nowhere near an N100 running at full pelt. In the comments, the author says that the power consumption of the N100 during the benchmarks was 3x that of the Raspberry Pi 5.
N100s have their place for sure, but for simple home labbing, I think they're overkill. But if you're running an Arr stack, it's definitely worth considering.
But the N100 running at full pelt will be running way more intensive applications than Pi 5. In everyday scenario, that means you can run more applications comfortably without going "full pelt". AFAIK
I'm unsure. But I don't think the N100 runs at reduced capacity. The benchmark testing doesn't suggest so anyway. So it's either full power or nothing.
Perhaps you are thinking in best and better and what most people want. For me there is something like curiosity (Not very uncommon in the open source world) and learning new things.Besides that I am not very amused about Intel and their Spectre and Meltdown failures which is still not a closed book with new attacks being reported in the news.For hobby and work, computer security and privacy is something that I cannot neglect.
Yep, that's what 'generally' and 'niche' means. The n100 doesnt have hyper threading so isnt subject to that kind of attack - btw the same attack that AMD has been subject to to many times over and over. Not sure what's good on ARM curiosity - still interested to know.
I deeply regret my pi5 purchase. Here I was hoping to use it as a low power application server but I cannot get Ethernet working reliably after a hot reboot. Seems to be a distro agnostic issue, though I acknowledge this could be a part failure.
I’m guessing the power implications here are minimal as well?
That's an interesting point I didn't think about.I don't know and I have no gadget to test that.
Actually once I've left the USB Ethernet adapter in a smart phone and forgot to take it out (but I did take the Ethernet cable out). The next day I saw that the phone had used a lot of battery power.I guess the phone kept talking to the adapter and the build in small light.I have one adapter without a light so I can test how much battery that would roughly consume, just out of curiosity.
No problem at all. I can try to measure this with a socket wattmeter I have lying around.
The power implications aren't likely to he a deal breaker, but I do love the idea of operating an application server at approx 7W (that said, the same power envelope is also achievable on certain x86-64 home server platforms now).
No problem at all. I can try to measure this with a socket wattmeter I have lying around.
The power implications aren’t likely to he a deal breaker, but I do love the idea of operating an application server at approx 7W (that said, the same power envelope is also achievable on certain x86-64 home server platforms now).
Right.Meanwhile the on-board Ethernet port could become more reliable with newer software or some tweaks ?
I'm glad it's working for you. I'm wondering if my issues will be resolved in the future by firmware upgrades (also holding out for uboot updates anyway). Not giving up on it just yet.
I don’t know if you’ve already tried this, but I’ve had weird behavior with older Pi3s when the power supplies weren’t up to snuff.
A good 5V/10A (yeah I know they only need 5A) sorted out one of mine that had a heavy load of Neopixels running on it, even though the neopixels had their own 5V supply.
I haven’t needed to get a Pi5 for any of my projects and really use them as big arduinos in certain uses (better for camera detection and remote reprogramming).
At this point, I’m not sure why someone would buy a Pi. I used my Pi 3 for years and got it super cheap on release.
You mean why anyone would buy a new Pi that is not a Pi3 ?
Pi4 can boot from USB meaning that the usage of a SD card can be omitted completely. Not sure a Pi3 can do that or do that easily ?
Someone like me who heard how cool raspberry pi was and tried to get one for years and then finally got it this year, but turns out that there’s better stuff out there in the market now
They were awesome when they were $30. Nice support, do niche things, but now they're the same price as a decent Window micro PC without the Linux hastle.
I have three boards on order just to play with, see if I can get coverage in our town for family and friends. It's an interesting rabbit hole that I've been reading up on for a few months, and I'm the least techy person you've ever met (literally called my family into the room to watch a LED blink slower & faster with my Arduino beginner kit last week - and I'm in my late 40s).
First heard of it on It Could Happen Here podcast with a guest named Andre aka hydroponic trash, and he has a decent comprehensive write-up about it (I dunno how to put links in here, sorry) and been watching youtube, etc about it since. It's the reason I have the above-mentioned Arduino beginner's kit, tbh :)
Funny side-note: it's apparently popular in the UK, where youtubers have shared lots of tips plus stories about meeting like-minded folks, having informal meetups at local pubs with people on the mesh, etc. Contrast that with US-based youtubers posting about it: "When the guv'ment shuts down the networks & civil war starts yer gonna need this to stay off the grid and communicate with yer team!" Like, c'mon...
I have two set up. But I live in the middle of nowhere. So no traffic. However I did get a fly by once. Someone flew over my house on a commercial flight broadcasting. That was neat. Doubt they were able to pick up my reply.
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