8 ms·

Pinode: Raspberry Pi in the Cloud

86 points by gpjt 14y ago

hjwp3 14y ago
love it!
TeamMCS 14y ago
Would love to see some pictures of the 'data centre'
- lampington 14y ago
  I imagine it would looks something like this: http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/raspberry-pi-supercomputer-1-620x465.jpg?hash=AQx4MwRjZG http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/...
davidroberts 14y ago
I love it. See what happens when you click one of the "Buy" buttons.
- subway 14y ago
  Agreed. I found myself halfway to a facepalm until I clicked the "Buy" button. Beautifully executed trolling.
  - sharkweek 14y ago
    The bottom bit of copy was great -- but until then I was like "hmmm... is this real?"
3dptz 14y ago
Excellent! I was about to close the webpage when I looked at more than just the bronze subscription.
gambiting 14y ago
Or you could just buy a Raspberry PI, and send it to EDIS in Austria: http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ And there you get FREE symmetrical 100mbit connection with no monthly payment. And you can always get your Raspberry Pi back if you need to, you just need to pay a few euros for postage.
- gpjt 14y ago
  Holy crap, someone's doing this for real?!
  - gambiting 14y ago
    Yup. I've got friends who have their PIs there, works like a charm. I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home. But tbh it would be worth it to buy another one and send it there just to have a remote ssh server through which I could tunnel in times of need.
    - wcfields 14y ago
      <i> I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home.</i> Holy shit, just looked this up. What a great idea (instead of paying $$$ for a Time Capsule).
      - gambiting 14y ago
        Yeah both my and my dad use it to back up our macs. It cost me $35 for the raspberry pi and $80 for a 1TB drive a few months ago. The only issue is that Raspberry Pi has its Lan connected through the USB internally, so the USB drive and Lan share bandwidth - which means that my backups run at 5-6MB/s, which is not ideal, but works just fine. Just leave it for a few hours when you do your first backup,and after that it runs completely fine ;-)
  - aychedee 14y ago
    Rule 34... Can someone post some shots of their facilities. I'm just interested. Ya know.
andyleclair 14y ago
I forgot I had this extension enabled: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt and hilarity ensued.
- DanWaterworth 14y ago
  I wrote a similar script that changed iPhone, iPad etc with bat phone, bat pad etc.
simpsond 14y ago
One of the best features of the RPI is integration with other hardware (i2c, SPI, GPIO). It's neat to toggle a motor from a bash prompt. When that goes away, it's just a linux box. It looks like you are having fun though, so I applaud that. Edit: I guess the joke was lost on me.
gpjt 14y ago
BTW I'd like to thank the guys at Zurb for producing Foundation. The whole Pinode site took less than 45 minutes to write, of which we spent about ten minutes on the design and the rest on the jokes. And we'd never done anything with Foundation before. Definitely a fantastic framework for putting a product site together quickly.
- nivertech 14y ago
  Would you say that Foundation is better fit for marketing/product sites, while Bootstrap is better for webapps/admins?
  - gpjt 14y ago
    Can't say. We used bootstrap for our main product site and it was great. We found foundation better for the pinode marketing site but we've never used it for a webapps, so it might be better for those too.
jasonkostempski 14y ago
Shouldn't this announcement have waited about a week?
olympus 14y ago
This should have been saved for 1 April. It's good advertising though, and since it hit the front page of HN it's probably driving a ton of traffic to their site.
- gpjt 14y ago
  We probably should have waited but it was one of those silly ideas you get on a Friday evening and we're probably never have got round to it if we'd not done it right away. In terms of traffic to our main site -- not too much, 400 extra visitors or so. But that's not a problem, we did it because we thought it was funny, and put in the link to PythonAnywhere as an afterthought. Just wanted to share the joke. That said, the Pinode site is running in one of our standard $5/month accounts and is handling a Hacker News front page (a few dozen hits/second) without even breaking a sweat. Just sayin'...
zenocon 14y ago
Can I ask why (without trying to sound awful and steal someone's front page thunder)? If you want to do something interesting with the Pi you'll probably be wanting to connect other hardware to it. You can't when it is in the cloud. Otherwise, it is just a general purpose Arm/Linux board that has far less power than anything else you could get in the cloud-o-spehere...so I'm just genuinely wondering what you would use this for? Plus, the hardware is so cheap ($25-35 USD), it sorta defeats the purpose of HW in the cloud to save cost (hardware as a service, e.g. EC2, etc)..
- theon144 14y ago
  Try buying it :)
  - zenocon 14y ago
    [Edit] ah ok -- nice troll :)
- cloudmaster 14y ago
  As an alternative to low-end VPS's it's not the worst idea in the world at $5 a month. It'd cost more than that to upgrade your home's cable internet connection to be able to serve traffic decently.
  - nwh 14y ago
    For $5 a month you could alternatively get a reasonably beefy VPS at DIgitalOcean / another provider.
may 14y ago
I so wanted this. :(
- duskwuff 14y ago
  Most of the power of the BCM2835 is in the GPU. A headless rPi is a waste of perfectly good silicon.
mschuster91 14y ago
How do you do the DVI video capturing? Framegrabbers and IP KVM modules are dead expensive, AFAIK - and how do you handle reformatting?
- lcampbell 14y ago
  Despite the fact that the OP is in jest, I found myself wondering the same. The best we could come up with at the office was to get some SDHC cards that are hardware read-only lockable (the spec says they exist [1], but I wasn't able to find any to purchase). On these SDHC cards, you stick a PXE-like implementation that allows it to pull a disk image off another machine in the DC, install it to an attached USB drive, then chainboot to that disk. This setup would allow customers to upload an image which is effectively burned and attached to the hardware during an automated provisioning process. When the node is powered down, the USB drive is wiped by the next provisioning. The customer is expected to set up the image so that it provides ssh (or what have you) on boot. Since the failure state of, say, a kernel panic in this setup is complete data loss, there's no need for KVM or anything. It probably wouldn't be a very competitive service, but as mentioned elsewhere, for $5/month most applications are likely better off with a VPS anyway. -- [1] http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-on-an-sd-card-hardware-firmware-or-software-driver-os http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-...
- lsc 14y ago
  eh, I've been looking at doing something like this (hosting PI units) and the OOB solution I'm considering is soldering on a serial console. I would also need to figure out some automated bootloader setup, of course.
  - jnw2 14y ago
    Maybe you should pay to have built a batch of a thousand custom boards that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the standard Raspberry Pi, so that they have a proper serial port etc. You could also consider putting more than one ARM computer on each board (at which point maybe you want fewer than a thousand boards) and building an ethernet switch into that board, etc, and maybe you could even hardwire all the serial lines within the board, etc.
DigitalDesignDj 14y ago
I call BS, I would really like to see someone prove that these are all really raspi units and not just Debian Squeeze instances running on a virtual server. Also, I have a raspi myself. The beauty of the raspi is not that you get to eat the pie, its that you get to make it yourself. Cloud connected? I think you mean Internet, not cloud. You know, unless these are Debian Squeezes on a virtualized box. Don't have the time? Then you can't have this hobby. End of rant.
- chuable 14y ago
  Click the buy button then come back and rant some more.

86 points by gpjt 14y ago

hjwp3 14y ago

love it!

TeamMCS 14y ago

Would love to see some pictures of the 'data centre'

lampington 14y ago
I imagine it would looks something like this: http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/raspberry-pi-supercomputer-1-620x465.jpg?hash=AQx4MwRjZG http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/...

davidroberts 14y ago

I love it. See what happens when you click one of the "Buy" buttons.

subway 14y ago
Agreed. I found myself halfway to a facepalm until I clicked the "Buy" button. Beautifully executed trolling.
- sharkweek 14y ago
  The bottom bit of copy was great -- but until then I was like "hmmm... is this real?"

3dptz 14y ago

Excellent! I was about to close the webpage when I looked at more than just the bronze subscription.

gambiting 14y ago

Or you could just buy a Raspberry PI, and send it to EDIS in Austria: http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/ And there you get FREE symmetrical 100mbit connection with no monthly payment. And you can always get your Raspberry Pi back if you need to, you just need to pay a few euros for postage.

gpjt 14y ago
Holy crap, someone's doing this for real?!
- gambiting 14y ago
  Yup. I've got friends who have their PIs there, works like a charm. I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home. But tbh it would be worth it to buy another one and send it there just to have a remote ssh server through which I could tunnel in times of need.
  - wcfields 14y ago
    <i> I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home.</i> Holy shit, just looked this up. What a great idea (instead of paying $$$ for a Time Capsule).
    - gambiting 14y ago
      Yeah both my and my dad use it to back up our macs. It cost me $35 for the raspberry pi and $80 for a 1TB drive a few months ago. The only issue is that Raspberry Pi has its Lan connected through the USB internally, so the USB drive and Lan share bandwidth - which means that my backups run at 5-6MB/s, which is not ideal, but works just fine. Just leave it for a few hours when you do your first backup,and after that it runs completely fine ;-)
- aychedee 14y ago
  Rule 34... Can someone post some shots of their facilities. I'm just interested. Ya know.

andyleclair 14y ago

I forgot I had this extension enabled: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt and hilarity ensued.

DanWaterworth 14y ago
I wrote a similar script that changed iPhone, iPad etc with bat phone, bat pad etc.

simpsond 14y ago

One of the best features of the RPI is integration with other hardware (i2c, SPI, GPIO). It's neat to toggle a motor from a bash prompt. When that goes away, it's just a linux box. It looks like you are having fun though, so I applaud that. Edit: I guess the joke was lost on me.

gpjt 14y ago

BTW I'd like to thank the guys at Zurb for producing Foundation. The whole Pinode site took less than 45 minutes to write, of which we spent about ten minutes on the design and the rest on the jokes. And we'd never done anything with Foundation before. Definitely a fantastic framework for putting a product site together quickly.

nivertech 14y ago
Would you say that Foundation is better fit for marketing/product sites, while Bootstrap is better for webapps/admins?
- gpjt 14y ago
  Can't say. We used bootstrap for our main product site and it was great. We found foundation better for the pinode marketing site but we've never used it for a webapps, so it might be better for those too.

jasonkostempski 14y ago

Shouldn't this announcement have waited about a week?

olympus 14y ago

This should have been saved for 1 April. It's good advertising though, and since it hit the front page of HN it's probably driving a ton of traffic to their site.

gpjt 14y ago
We probably should have waited but it was one of those silly ideas you get on a Friday evening and we're probably never have got round to it if we'd not done it right away. In terms of traffic to our main site -- not too much, 400 extra visitors or so. But that's not a problem, we did it because we thought it was funny, and put in the link to PythonAnywhere as an afterthought. Just wanted to share the joke. That said, the Pinode site is running in one of our standard $5/month accounts and is handling a Hacker News front page (a few dozen hits/second) without even breaking a sweat. Just sayin'...

zenocon 14y ago

Can I ask why (without trying to sound awful and steal someone's front page thunder)? If you want to do something interesting with the Pi you'll probably be wanting to connect other hardware to it. You can't when it is in the cloud. Otherwise, it is just a general purpose Arm/Linux board that has far less power than anything else you could get in the cloud-o-spehere...so I'm just genuinely wondering what you would use this for? Plus, the hardware is so cheap ($25-35 USD), it sorta defeats the purpose of HW in the cloud to save cost (hardware as a service, e.g. EC2, etc)..

theon144 14y ago
Try buying it :)
- zenocon 14y ago
  [Edit] ah ok -- nice troll :)
cloudmaster 14y ago
As an alternative to low-end VPS's it's not the worst idea in the world at $5 a month. It'd cost more than that to upgrade your home's cable internet connection to be able to serve traffic decently.
- nwh 14y ago
  For $5 a month you could alternatively get a reasonably beefy VPS at DIgitalOcean / another provider.

may 14y ago

I so wanted this. :(

duskwuff 14y ago
Most of the power of the BCM2835 is in the GPU. A headless rPi is a waste of perfectly good silicon.

mschuster91 14y ago

How do you do the DVI video capturing? Framegrabbers and IP KVM modules are dead expensive, AFAIK - and how do you handle reformatting?

lcampbell 14y ago
Despite the fact that the OP is in jest, I found myself wondering the same. The best we could come up with at the office was to get some SDHC cards that are hardware read-only lockable (the spec says they exist [1], but I wasn't able to find any to purchase). On these SDHC cards, you stick a PXE-like implementation that allows it to pull a disk image off another machine in the DC, install it to an attached USB drive, then chainboot to that disk. This setup would allow customers to upload an image which is effectively burned and attached to the hardware during an automated provisioning process. When the node is powered down, the USB drive is wiped by the next provisioning. The customer is expected to set up the image so that it provides ssh (or what have you) on boot. Since the failure state of, say, a kernel panic in this setup is complete data loss, there's no need for KVM or anything. It probably wouldn't be a very competitive service, but as mentioned elsewhere, for $5/month most applications are likely better off with a VPS anyway. -- [1] http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-on-an-sd-card-hardware-firmware-or-software-driver-os http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-...
lsc 14y ago
eh, I've been looking at doing something like this (hosting PI units) and the OOB solution I'm considering is soldering on a serial console. I would also need to figure out some automated bootloader setup, of course.
- jnw2 14y ago
  Maybe you should pay to have built a batch of a thousand custom boards that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the standard Raspberry Pi, so that they have a proper serial port etc. You could also consider putting more than one ARM computer on each board (at which point maybe you want fewer than a thousand boards) and building an ethernet switch into that board, etc, and maybe you could even hardwire all the serial lines within the board, etc.

DigitalDesignDj 14y ago

I call BS, I would really like to see someone prove that these are all really raspi units and not just Debian Squeeze instances running on a virtual server. Also, I have a raspi myself. The beauty of the raspi is not that you get to eat the pie, its that you get to make it yourself. Cloud connected? I think you mean Internet, not cloud. You know, unless these are Debian Squeezes on a virtualized box. Don't have the time? Then you can't have this hobby. End of rant.

chuable 14y ago
Click the buy button then come back and rant some more.