We refused the VC money. We rejected the AWS credits. We believe that if you cannot run it on your own metal, you do not own the platform.
The premise was stupid simple: Kubernetes is heavy. Docker is heavy. But containerization is just Linux cgroups and namespaces. If we could strip away the bloat, could we run a global edge network on consumer hardware that costs $35 a pop?
1. The Hardware Heist
We didn't buy new. We scraped eBay. We bought bulk lots of Raspberry Pi 4s (4GB RAM models) from a failed crypto-mining operation in Nevada.
The total haul: 250 units.
Cost: $12,000 (One time fee).
To rent equivalent compute power on AWS would cost roughly $15,000 every single month. We paid once. We own it forever.
2. The Software Stack (K3s vs. Custom Rust)
Initially, we tried K3s (Lightweight Kubernetes). It failed. Even stripped down, the Kubelet agent consumed 600MB of RAM per node. On a 4GB Pi, that's 15% of your resources gone just to keep the lights on.
We realized we didn't need orchestration for generic workloads. We needed to deploy our specific container runtime. So we wrote ronin-node in Rust.
fn main() {
let system_ram = sys_info::mem_info().unwrap().total;
// Hard limit: Engine takes max 50MB
if system_ram < 4_000_000 {
println!("Initializing Low-Mem Mode...");
config::set_gc_aggressive(true);
}
network::bind_tcp("0.0.0.0:80").await;
}
The result? 42MB RAM usage at idle. This gave us nearly the full capacity of the Pi for user deployments.
3. The Heat Problem
Here is what they don't tell you about ARM chips: they throttle aggressively. When you stack 50 Pis in a closet, ambient temperature hits 40°C in minutes.
We didn't have budget for a CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) unit. We went to Home Depot. We bought three industrial box fans and built a wind tunnel using PVC pipes.
LESSON LEARNED
Infrastructure isn't just software. It's physics. If you cannot displace heat, your 3.5GHz processor becomes a 1.2GHz heater.
4. Networking: The Nightmare
Exposing 250 nodes behind a residential ISP NAT is impossible. We used WireGuard to create a mesh network. Every Pi dials out to a cheap bare-metal Gateway which acts as the public ingress.
Traffic flow:
User -> Gateway -> WireGuard Tunnel -> Raspberry Pi -> Container
Latency penalty? About 15ms. Acceptable for our use case (static sites and background workers).
5. The Result
We successfully scaled the cluster to handle 10,000 concurrent containers (mostly idle, but active). The entire cluster cost us a one-time fee of $12k plus about $200/month in electricity.
Is this production ready? Absolutely not.
Is it cooler than paying Amazon a ransom every month? Yes.
READY TO DEPLOY ON REAL HARDWARE?
We took the lessons from the Pi cluster and built Ronin Core. Same efficiency, any hardware.
START DEPLOYING