by sokoloff on 11/6/21, 2:49 PM
I know that co-location means “customer owned hardware”, but in this case, I think I’d way rather rent data center owned RPis and just pay them money rather than sending in hardware, having to cycle out hardware if/when it fails, etc.
It also means the colo is running whatever random power supply I send them, which seems like something they’d want to avoid and means that there’s all the inefficiency of 12 supplies per U rather than one beefy +5.1V supply (with battery backing) feeding the Pis via the GPIO pins.
by PragmaticPulp on 11/6/21, 2:47 PM
I like the idea in theory, but I can’t entirely agree with the “Green” designation. Putting 12 Raspberry Pis, 12 USB SSDs, 12 switch ports, and cabling and power supplies for all of the above adds up quickly.
From a pure compute-per-watt perspective using typical cloud workloads, I’d still expect a run of the mill shared cloud server to be more efficient. It would also allow for more burst overhead for individual workloads.
This is an interesting option for people who need a specific Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere.
by frankjr on 11/6/21, 4:03 PM
While I completely understand the allure of running on your own hardware, if you just want a cheap server to host a personal page or similar, you cannot beat Scaleway's Stardust VM instances. For less than 2 EUR a month you get 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 1 IPv4+IPv6 address, 10GB of storage and unlimited traffic. They claim up-to 100Mbps bandwidth but I regularly get much more than that. This sounds like a commercial but I'm just really happy with the service.
by bennyp101 on 11/6/21, 2:52 PM
From
https://examesh.de/en/docs/colocation/accessing-the-pi/ :
"Instead of using a public IP the Pi is accessed by combining a public hostname with dedicated TCP ports. The hostname points to one of the ExaMesh gateways and is assigned to the colocation along with the available TCP ports in the booking process."
So maybe useful for an extra node for redundency, but maybe not as useful as having an actual address. Perhaps an extra encrypted Syncthing node or something
by solarkraft on 11/6/21, 3:56 PM
I'm gonna ask the dumb/obvious question: Why would I want this?
It's certainly not for the compute. Isn't the point of a Raspberry Pi controlling periphery on the edge? But that's not possible here?
???
It's not even needing ARM cores, as those are now cheaply offered by all the cloud computing companies.
Is it just for some cheap fun? But if I'm going to host something on cheap amateur grade hardware, why would I not also just use my home connection? Is this for the experience and education?
... I really don't see what it's good for (explanations welcome).
by smarx007 on 11/6/21, 7:49 PM
> To ensure that every Pi at our decentralized locations always has enough network throughput, the uplink and downlink is fixed at 10 Mbps.
Ok, thx, I have a 100/10 Mpbs link at home. The only reason I'd place my Pi in a colo is to get 100/100 Mpbs or 1 Gbit network.
Edit: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ (200Mpbs in the cheapest plan) or https://www.seedhost.eu/ (1/10G) is not too far from the €6,- price mark and I don't have to own the hardware.
by walrus01 on 11/6/21, 5:53 PM
I think I'd rather have a decently specced KVM VM on a x86-64 hypervisor somewhere, I can run mainline debian on, for $6/mo than a raspberry pi. For that money if you look you can get something with 2 pseudo cores, 2 gigs of ram, and probably 40GB of storage.
At least I can have more confidence that the storage won't spontaneously fail, and network throughput greater than 10 Mbps.
This seems like a cool idea and all and it's certainly cheap for hobby projects. But I wonder how viable it really is as a business model. Doing the math on person-hour costs if just one pi requires 15 minutes of support/human attention from a person at the ISP, once, you're losing money on that customer forever.
by whalesalad on 11/6/21, 3:38 PM
This is
neat but from a scaling perspective it doesn’t make sense. A single server grade Xeon chip can expose the same compute power as a cluster of these devices, with better performance across the board (memory access, peripherals, etc)
Just trying to grok a legit use case?
by mysterydip on 11/6/21, 3:35 PM
"12 pis in 1U" where 1U is defined as the height of a pi on its side plus shelf, rather than the definition of 1U in every other 19" rackmount data center
by joosters on 11/6/21, 2:55 PM
Somewhat ironically, I'd guess that putting a server inside a wind turbine makes it
less likely that you are utilising green energy. The power and comms connections to that location are there primarily to monitor the turbine, and they want that to work all the time, and
especially when the blades aren't turning. So you don't go powering it with the wind farm itself.
Installing the server anywhere else means there is a chance that its power is being generated by that wind turbine!
by roughly on 11/6/21, 6:18 PM
I totally understand all of the drawbacks here, I agree that it’s hard to think of an actual use case, and all that aside, there’s something aesthetically pleasing here in an “I’d read about this in a William Gibson novel” kind of way. “My compute fleet is distributed across a field of windmills in Europe” just _sounds_ cool.
by daneel_w on 11/6/21, 11:33 PM
A question to ExaMesh, in case someone from there happens to be reading: could you publically offer a guarantee and promise that not a single byte will be read off of (or written to) customers' SD cards or SSD drives before being installed, or after being uninstalled from your racks?
by holri on 11/6/21, 3:47 PM
by jagger27 on 11/6/21, 7:11 PM
I can’t imagine having any hardware colocated without proper out-of-band KVM access. Who is going to drive out to the wind turbine and flash a new disk image to my Pi?
10Mbps is also excruciatingly slow. I was ready to see a 100Mbps cap.
by buildbuildbuild on 11/6/21, 3:46 PM
I think they'll need to iterate a bit to find product market fit. The 10mbit bandwidth limit, calling it "Decentralized", no public IP downsides are off-putting even at this price.
by anyfactor on 11/6/21, 4:11 PM
I bet everyone who has a raspberry pi had this idea. Throwing a raspberry pi with a solar panel and a sim card to a random place. It could be for backup, vpn or to access some private network. But having it be a rackmounted VM in a fixed location doesn't sound that fun to me.
by ushakov on 11/6/21, 4:54 PM
by erulabs on 11/6/21, 7:07 PM
Hey this is sort of the mirror opposite of my startup (we try to bring the internet to your home-pi, rather than ship your home-pi to a datacenter!). Neat tho! I'm not entirely sure it's that power efficient versus a carved up hypervisor tho...
by daneel_w on 11/6/21, 11:24 PM
The main gotchas: 1) no public IP of your own but instead you get a few dedicated ports NATd to you on a shared IP, 2) bandwidth is fixed at 10/10 Mbit/s.
Pi co-lo for just four bucks a month sounded great until the fine print was revealed...
by projektfu on 11/6/21, 3:36 PM
How do you fit a raspberry pi edge-wise (56.5mm) into a rack unit (44.5mm)?
by mr_sturd on 11/6/21, 3:20 PM
EDIS offered a colo service for free, back in the early RPi days.
I had two gen 1.5 machines hosted with them; one with OwnCloud, and another hosted my music via SFTP.
by Elyott on 11/6/21, 11:33 PM
10mbps? Seems pretty low and a bit pointless unless you preload the SSD, even then, why?
by RL_Quine on 11/6/21, 3:20 PM
The description of "decentralized" seems to be a little weak here.
by systemvoltage on 11/7/21, 3:36 AM
by mkj on 11/7/21, 12:27 AM
If it's BYO power brick you could also colo a second computer inside the power brick, using the rpi as a "modem" for it. Put a tamper resistant device inside that case.
by drcongo on 11/7/21, 8:53 AM
Can't believe they didn't call it Picolo.
by sgtnoodle on 11/6/21, 5:21 PM
I wonder how they mirror the raspberry pis without destroying them.
(Look at their cad drawing of 12 pis in a rack.)
by ZiiS on 11/6/21, 5:40 PM
Realy needs a secure boot option.
by 1MachineElf on 11/6/21, 4:38 PM
At least this offering eliminates the threat vector a of compromised hypervisor.
by paulcole on 11/6/21, 4:38 PM
How exactly is it exclusive?
by ruined on 11/6/21, 5:53 PM
ok but does anyone offer pi VMs that can boot my sdcard image
by aofeisheng on 11/6/21, 5:41 PM
> What is the traffic limit?
> It's 2021. We don't have a traffic limit for a Raspberry Pi.
> What is the data transfer rate?
> The data rate is synchronously set to 10 Mbit/s per Raspberry.
It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough.