I have the possibility of getting my hands on a practically unlimited supply of S905X2 Android boxes, they have 2GB of RAM and 8GB eMMC, only 100Mbit LAN but USB-3 as well.
I was joking around with colleagues, what about making an ARM cluster out of them? Use the 100Mbps port as a management port and add a USB3 Gigabit or 2.5G adapter for general traffic. Power the cluster by PoE using PoE to 5v splitters from a smart, management switch with PoE (10W each box?).
Lets say I got 40 boxes with 4 cores, that’s 160 cores and 80GB of RAM. It could run Armbian with Kubernetes or something lighter. I personally have no use for it, but it could be a fun proof of concept?
Tell me why I shouldn’t do this! Tell me why it won’t work and why I’d be wasting my time.
Plus the entire thing would likely be pulling way more power too, and take up 10-20x the space.
I switched a 6 year server over to a 3 node pi k8s and it runs with half the power. The one annoying thing is building images for Arm arch as a lot of common helm charts aren’t built for multi arch builds yet.