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It's a bad idea to run Docker on a Raspberry Pi, mostly because it will eat the memory card, it will be faulty way sooner because lots of I/O. I know from expe

It's a bad idea to run Docker on a Raspberry Pi, mostly because it will eat the memory card, it will be faulty way sooner because lots of I/O. I know from experience :)

magicalhippo 6y ago
What is it about Docker that makes it so much worse? Been running Home Assistant via Docker (Hassio) 24/7 for over two years now, off the same sd-card on my Raspberry Pi 3B, no issues so far.
- krastanov 6y ago
  The difference might be (besides card quality) the amount of free space on the card. If you are churning through the same 500MB with your temporary files you will wear the card off much faster compared to spreading the same IO over 5GB of empty space.
barumi 6y ago
In case you aren't aware, there are plenty of tutorials out there that help you get a raspberry pi to boot from USB, which allows you to use any HD there is. Moreover, nothing stops you from getting everything to run on a RAM drive. There are raspberry pis with 8GB of RAM on the market right now. Having said that, an official raspberry pi SD card with 16GB is sold for 10$. Not exactly something that pushes you to bankruptcy.
PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
Go diskless!
fulafel 6y ago
A lot of RPis are running on non-SD storage or durable SD Cards.
x86ARMsRace 6y ago
> it will be faulty way sooner because lots of I/O It all makes sense now. One of my first computing projects was making a small cluster computer with raspberry PI boards. I noticed that the SD cards started to fail oddly fast. Most likely since they were all either swam nodes, or a swarm controller.
throwaway08320 6y ago
> It's a bad idea to run Docker No need to add more.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Just map /var/lib/docker to another storage location, then.
abraae 6y ago
New raspberry pi 4s can boot from usb out of the box since a month or two ago.
m463 6y ago
I do agree with you. However, I think pi sd cards get a bad rap because of marginal power supplies (very common before pi 4) and unclean shutdowns. I had a card become corrupted and reformatting it did the trick since then.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  I had a Pi which was very unstable. Measured the USB cable, supposedly a charging cable, and it had 1 Ohm resistance! Replaced it with a proper one and rock solid since.
alexellisuk 6y ago
This isn't docker, it's containerd and once deployed this is mostly read-only. You can also mount a USB hard drive of NVMe over USB if you want. Personally, I netboot my RPis, and faasd works equally well on the public cloud.

It's a bad idea to run Docker on a Raspberry Pi, mostly because it will eat the memory card, it will be faulty way sooner because lots of I/O. I know from experience :)

magicalhippo 6y ago

What is it about Docker that makes it so much worse? Been running Home Assistant via Docker (Hassio) 24/7 for over two years now, off the same sd-card on my Raspberry Pi 3B, no issues so far.

krastanov 6y ago
The difference might be (besides card quality) the amount of free space on the card. If you are churning through the same 500MB with your temporary files you will wear the card off much faster compared to spreading the same IO over 5GB of empty space.

barumi 6y ago

In case you aren't aware, there are plenty of tutorials out there that help you get a raspberry pi to boot from USB, which allows you to use any HD there is. Moreover, nothing stops you from getting everything to run on a RAM drive. There are raspberry pis with 8GB of RAM on the market right now. Having said that, an official raspberry pi SD card with 16GB is sold for 10$. Not exactly something that pushes you to bankruptcy.

PrinceKropotkin 6y ago

Go diskless!

fulafel 6y ago

A lot of RPis are running on non-SD storage or durable SD Cards.

x86ARMsRace 6y ago

> it will be faulty way sooner because lots of I/O It all makes sense now. One of my first computing projects was making a small cluster computer with raspberry PI boards. I noticed that the SD cards started to fail oddly fast. Most likely since they were all either swam nodes, or a swarm controller.

throwaway08320 6y ago

> It's a bad idea to run Docker No need to add more.

heavyset_go 6y ago

Just map /var/lib/docker to another storage location, then.

abraae 6y ago

New raspberry pi 4s can boot from usb out of the box since a month or two ago.

m463 6y ago

I do agree with you. However, I think pi sd cards get a bad rap because of marginal power supplies (very common before pi 4) and unclean shutdowns. I had a card become corrupted and reformatting it did the trick since then.

magicalhippo 6y ago
I had a Pi which was very unstable. Measured the USB cable, supposedly a charging cable, and it had 1 Ohm resistance! Replaced it with a proper one and rock solid since.

alexellisuk 6y ago

This isn't docker, it's containerd and once deployed this is mostly read-only. You can also mount a USB hard drive of NVMe over USB if you want. Personally, I netboot my RPis, and faasd works equally well on the public cloud.