As you’ve read, I’ve been on something of a Raspberry Pi kick of late:
- How to Turn Off the HDMI Monitor on Your Raspberry Pi 5. It’s Not As Easy as You Might Think
- Raspberry Pi Photo Frame: The Major Slideshow Options + Thermal Monitoring Script
So why not try out a Raspberry Pi in the cloud?
Why Would Anyone Want Such a Thing?
Why, to run a massive e-commerce site…
Well, no. Yes, it’s a dedicated server but the honest truth is that you’ll get more horsepower off an honest VPS than you will off a Raspberry Pi. That’s just the nature of a small board system. Of course, if your site does minimal processing and is mostly static data, putting something like CloudFlare in front of it can go a long way.
Genuine reasons for wanting one are:
- You do ARM development or want to play with ARM
- You’re a bit paranoid and want the slightly better security against snooping that dedicated hardware provides
- You’re one of those “don’t ask why, ask why not” kind of people who enjoys these kind of hobbyist moments
Whatever your reason, if you’re looking for an RPi in the cloud, look no further than RPIServers.com, run by LowEndTalk’s own @DataIdeas-Josh. Some pricing as of this writing:
- Pi Zero (512MB RAM, 16GB MicroSD Card, IPv4+IPv6, Unmetered Bandwidth): $2.50/month
- Pi 3B+ (1GB RAM, 16GB MicroSD Card, IPv4+IPv6, Unmetered Bandwidth): $3.14/month (get it? π)
- Pi 4 (4GB RAM, 16GB MicroSD Card, IPv4+IPv6, Unmetered Bandwidth): $3.14/month
All pricing is right on their home page. Service is in Texas.
They were out of the 4 when I ordered, so I went with a R Pi 3B+.
Fits and Starts
Had a couple problems getting going. One issue was my bad, one was theirs.
I placed my order January 8 at 8:40am. I expected it to take a day or two to get setup, and they quote 24 hours for provisioning. However, the next morning I got an email saying that my order was on hold until I verified my email.
Oops. My bad. They did email me at time of signup telling me to click to verify and I overlooked it. So I clicked and waited for the next cycle.
About 12 hours later I got my welcome email, which included the IP and password. Naturally, the login user is ‘pi’ which is a Raspberry Pi standard.
I got busy with some other things and didn’t get back to the system until January 15. Unfortunately, the password didn’t work. I ticketed in:
- Mon Jan 15 @ 1312: my initial report of the problem
- Tue Jan 16 @ 17:48: acknowledge and say they’ll reimage, will take 24 hours
- Thu Jan 18 @ 14:05: ready for me to try again
The second time, it worked fine. So it took a little longer to reimage than they initially said, but I’m not surprised. There’s probably zero out-of-band access to a Pi (the way you find with dedicated servers), though in theory this is possible with a console. I’m guessing someone had to pop a MicroSD into a SD card writer, and then walk down to the datacenter rack and swap it out. For $3/month I still think that service is just fine.
The Pi!
The system came with Raspberry Pi OS 11.8 (Bullseye). This used to be called Raspbian but the foundation has moved to calling it “Raspberry Pi OS”.
$ grep ^Model /proc/cpuinfo Model : Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Plus Rev 1.3
It was reasonably up to date.
$ time sudo apt update Get:1 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian bullseye InRelease [23.6 kB] Get:2 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian bullseye InRelease [15.0 kB] Get:3 http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian bullseye/main armhf Packages [13.2 MB] Get:4 http://archive.raspberrypi.org/debian bullseye/main armhf Packages [313 kB] Fetched 12.8 MB in 28s (459 kB/s) Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done 9 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them. real 0m34.077s user 0m12.183s sys 0m1.346s
Memory and disk:
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 921 57 617 0 247 809
Swap: 99 0 99
$ df -h . Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/root 15G 1.4G 13G 10% /
So what am I going to do with this beast? I’ll probably spin up a web server and run something on it for grins. Might also be an excellent inbucket host.
YABS
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
# Yet-Another-Bench-Script #
# v2024-01-01 #
# https://github.com/masonr/yet-another-bench-script #
# ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #
Thu 18 Jan 14:16:55 CST 2024
ARM compatibility is considered *experimental*
Basic System Information:
---------------------------------
Uptime : 0 days, 0 hours, 36 minutes
Processor : Cortex-A53
CPU cores : 4 @ 1400.0000 MHz
AES-NI : ❌ Disabled
VM-x/AMD-V : ❌ Disabled
RAM : 922.0 MiB
Swap : 100.0 MiB
Disk : 14.6 GiB
Distro : Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Kernel : 6.1.21-v7+
VM Type : NONE
IPv4/IPv6 : ✔ Online / ❌ Offline
IPv4 Network Information:
---------------------------------
ISP : Data Ideas llc.
ASN : AS398355 Data Ideas llc.
Host : Data Ideas llc
Location : Spring, Texas (TX)
Country : United States
fio Disk Speed Tests (Mixed R/W 50/50) (Partition /dev/root):
---------------------------------
Block Size | 4k (IOPS) | 64k (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 1.64 MB/s (411) | 6.45 MB/s (100)
Write | 1.67 MB/s (418) | 6.79 MB/s (106)
Total | 3.31 MB/s (829) | 13.24 MB/s (206)
| |
Block Size | 512k (IOPS) | 1m (IOPS)
------ | --- ---- | ---- ----
Read | 8.98 MB/s (17) | 9.09 MB/s (8)
Write | 10.02 MB/s (19) | 10.28 MB/s (10)
Total | 19.00 MB/s (36) | 19.38 MB/s (18)
iperf3 Network Speed Tests (IPv4):
---------------------------------
Provider | Location (Link) | Send Speed | Recv Speed | Ping
----- | ----- | ---- | ---- | ----
Clouvider | London, UK (10G) | 274 Mbits/sec | 7.53 Mbits/sec | 105 ms
Scaleway | Paris, FR (10G) | busy | busy | 108 ms
NovoServe | North Holland, NL (40G) | 272 Mbits/sec | 85.1 Kbits/sec | --
Uztelecom | Tashkent, UZ (10G) | 269 Mbits/sec | 341 Kbits/sec | 212 ms
Clouvider | NYC, NY, US (10G) | 293 Mbits/sec | 21.3 Mbits/sec | 38.7 ms
Clouvider | Dallas, TX, US (10G) | 298 Mbits/sec | 37.8 Mbits/sec | 7.87 ms
Clouvider | Los Angeles, CA, US (10G) | 292 Mbits/sec | 17.7 Mbits/sec | 38.3 ms
Geekbench test failed and low memory was detected. Add at least 1GB of SWAP or use GB4 instead (higher compatibility with low memory systems).
YABS completed in 9 min 48 sec
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I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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