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.
I was hoping they'd have a DC power supply per rack, but their FAQ makes it clear that this is not the case. Bit of a missed opportunity there. Handling heterogeneous power supplies sounds like a nightmare.
Thanks for your comment about the power supplies. Not every power supply will work. a) As stated in the FAQs and again when successfully booked: " Note that the power supply should have at least 3.0A / 5.1V power. It must be CE certified and support DC power." b) The DCs are located in Germany: 230 V - DC.
I have also read all the other comments on this subject: Yes, currently each Pi runs with its own power supply.
Currently, our team is developing a dedicated power supply for all Pi slots within the rack. Then it will also be possible for users to turn the power on and off via the colocation dashboard. However, the development will still take a little time. The reason for this is that some components are not immediately available and especially not in large quantities. See analogously the availability of Pis.
It seems like either feeding 5v via custom power supply on GPIO or requiring PoE HATs (though those are slightly less efficient...) would be a better scalable option.
One massive thing that seems to be missing here (unless I've missed it) is any kind of remote ability to manage the server, eg at a minimum remote power cycling, if the Pi locks up. It would also be nice to get remote console but that would require even more effort and potentially slight customization on the Pis' boot config (to enable UART).
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.
> This is an interesting option for people who need a specific Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere.
What is that use case though? The page says that they only host regular Pis and optionally a USB SSD. So they can't do anything that a regular cloud server can't do - no custom hats, etc.
I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now is that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video streaming. So this product could interest me, in theory - saves me from having to migrate all my data & configuration to a cloud server. But I would rather pay Hetzner a very similar amount of money to get a VPS that's about as powerful as a Pi (probably more) and still have the physical Pi here at home as a fallback.
Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed tasks for which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient?
"Green", now removed from the title, but still on the landingpage refers to the power used by our data center. Our data centers operate inside wind & solar parks, therefor we only use green energy. If there is no wind or sun we directly purchase green energy. Of course every DC is connected to the public grid for continuous operation.
Raspberry Pis may be "green" in that they are cheap, but power efficient they aren't. They have barely any power management support, making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips.
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.
I think local hardware makes sense for LAN-only sites - e.g. a company wiki, a media center or a file storage with web interface.
For anything that is supposed to be visible on the internet, I'd always use a hosted server - if nothing else, because I really don't want to open an ingress into my personal home network, even if my ISP permitted that.
For use-cases were you have to handle certain incoming requests even though your setup is mostly LAN-only otherwise (webhooks, ACME, adding some dashboard you can access from your phone...), services like PageKite[1] sound promising.
I would recommend Racknerd as well. Not affiliated with them except a happy customer. I pay $36/yr for my 2 GB memory, 2 vCPU, 50 GB SSD VPS that I run Nextcloud on. I also have a $16/yr VPS with 1.5 GB memory and 30 GB SSD for K3s
"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
Thanks for mentioning it. Yes, there are quite a few use cases as these are already implemented by customers: Backup, Sync, Nodes (e.g. BTC Full Nodes), Relay, ...
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).
For many years I was part of a bandwidth cooperative. We had a cabinet and a fat pipe and a bunch of sysadmins who wanted a place to keep their stuff. Early on it was all 1U or 2U systems. But later there was enough demand for Mac Minis that we dedicated a shelf to them.
It didn't make much sense from a professional syadmin's perspective. But for a Mac user who already had their little project on a Mini and wanted to get it off their home bandwidth, it made sense to them in that it was one simple, incremental change. I imagine the market here is similar.
Anything benefiting from a static IP address, such as running your own VPN, mail server, Bitcoin node, TOR node... the latter of which got me banned by my bank's security team because I was marked as "suspicious traffic" (wasn't even an exit node) - preventing me from using online banking. Talking to support proved fruitless, however the ban was lifted as soon as I changed my IP address.
Next to the other arguments, the colocation is pretty cheap. In Germany, you can calculate ~20ct per Wattmonth for electricity, so ~1€ of this would go to electricity alone. Hosting at home also tends to come without static IP and non-symmetrical, somewhat unstable connections (speaking from painful experience).
For this service you pay ~6€ per month (assuming 50€ for the Pi and two years of runtime, no SSD) for a rather powerful VM. Just as a comparison, at Linode, you get 1 shared CPU and 1G of RAM for roughly the same price, compared to 4 core and 4-8 gigs with the Pi. Storage is even more expensive, so if you attach a large SSD, the calculation becomes even better (but the 10Mbit might become a bottleneck quickly).
Security perhaps. VPS is no longer as secure with the rowhammer and cache exploitation vulnerabilities. And if you only need a tiny system, a raspberry pi is pretty ideal
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.
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)
The use case is greenwashing and separating people from their money because everyone thinks Pis are just the bee's knees.
The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is twice as fast (at least) as the G6400...so in theory a 5600x is twice as energy efficient as a Pi4 if fully loaded. Sure this doesn't account for system fans and the motherboard, but they don't use that much compared to the CPU.
The whole point of virtualization is that most systems are idle a lot of the time. At datacenter scale virtualization, you can dramatically over-provision and shut down/sleep unnecessary nodes, firing them up when you need to. You can get near 100% utilization on your hardware, making the very most of every watt that doesn't go to actually computing.
Here they're going to have a zillion Pi4's, most of them sitting idle, but still using a couple watts. They're not even bothering to use any sort of shared power to improve PSU efficiency. They're not even bothering to use Pi4 compute modules.
Now, the interesting bit is that now there's the Pi Zero Wireless 2. It has nearly the compute power of the 3B+, but the highest energy efficiency per watt of any Pi board so far...
"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
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!
One could power the equipment off the turbine when it's operating, and off an alternative supply otherwise.
It seems a little silly to worry about where the specific electrons came from to power the equipment, though. If powering that equipment enables a wind turbine to produce more power than it would have without that equipment, then it seems like the existence of that equipment is "green" whether or not its power came from dirtier sources.
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.
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?
Not ExaMesh, but there are a variety of ways to encrypt the card and remotely unlock it.
You can use dropbear to ssh into the Pi and provide the key during boot.
You can have the Pi connect to a remote system to retrieve the key.
Some methods are obviously not perfect, but it'll definitely make it more complicated than just "copy the card." Remote key retrieval would let you audit when the system was booted and so on.
There's a more complex purpose-built open source software package specifically for handling remote disk unlocks but I'm blanking on the name and my google searches aren't turning it up. I vaguely recall it had fairly high levels of paranoia in its design.
I personally vouch for our team, but think about it: your Pi is connected to the Internet. You are responsible for the security of the Pi (system security, updates, encryption ...). You send us the hardware in the mail. How many hands does the package go through? Of course, no one gets into the data center without access authorization, etc. pp.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
Most domain extensions are already registered. And since we are from Germany, the term "Piccolo" sound very similar to "Picolo" but means something very different: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccolo_(Sekt)
However, we would have definitely pursued an overlap/commonality of the word with, say, beer!
sokoloff|4 years ago
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.
klyrs|4 years ago
joosters|4 years ago
prirun|4 years ago
https://examesh.de/en/instances/pi/
HideousKojima|4 years ago
3xa|4 years ago
I have also read all the other comments on this subject: Yes, currently each Pi runs with its own power supply.
Currently, our team is developing a dedicated power supply for all Pi slots within the rack. Then it will also be possible for users to turn the power on and off via the colocation dashboard. However, the development will still take a little time. The reason for this is that some components are not immediately available and especially not in large quantities. See analogously the availability of Pis.
geerlingguy|4 years ago
One massive thing that seems to be missing here (unless I've missed it) is any kind of remote ability to manage the server, eg at a minimum remote power cycling, if the Pi locks up. It would also be nice to get remote console but that would require even more effort and potentially slight customization on the Pis' boot config (to enable UART).
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
husam212|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp|4 years ago
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.
piaste|4 years ago
What is that use case though? The page says that they only host regular Pis and optionally a USB SSD. So they can't do anything that a regular cloud server can't do - no custom hats, etc.
I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now is that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video streaming. So this product could interest me, in theory - saves me from having to migrate all my data & configuration to a cloud server. But I would rather pay Hetzner a very similar amount of money to get a VPS that's about as powerful as a Pi (probably more) and still have the physical Pi here at home as a fallback.
Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed tasks for which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient?
3xa|4 years ago
"Green", now removed from the title, but still on the landingpage refers to the power used by our data center. Our data centers operate inside wind & solar parks, therefor we only use green energy. If there is no wind or sun we directly purchase green energy. Of course every DC is connected to the public grid for continuous operation.
AshamedCaptain|4 years ago
frankjr|4 years ago
ringworld|4 years ago
I am not a fan of the lottery approach and being told you're lucky to do business with them.
lizknope|4 years ago
https://lowendbox.com/
xg15|4 years ago
For anything that is supposed to be visible on the internet, I'd always use a hosted server - if nothing else, because I really don't want to open an ingress into my personal home network, even if my ISP permitted that.
For use-cases were you have to handle certain incoming requests even though your setup is mostly LAN-only otherwise (webhooks, ACME, adding some dashboard you can access from your phone...), services like PageKite[1] sound promising.
[1] http://pagekite.net/
gurchik|4 years ago
jcun4128|4 years ago
bennyp101|4 years ago
"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
3xa|4 years ago
solarkraft|4 years ago
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).
wpietri|4 years ago
It didn't make much sense from a professional syadmin's perspective. But for a Mac user who already had their little project on a Mini and wanted to get it off their home bandwidth, it made sense to them in that it was one simple, incremental change. I imagine the market here is similar.
glenneroo|4 years ago
Sebb767|4 years ago
For this service you pay ~6€ per month (assuming 50€ for the Pi and two years of runtime, no SSD) for a rather powerful VM. Just as a comparison, at Linode, you get 1 shared CPU and 1G of RAM for roughly the same price, compared to 4 core and 4-8 gigs with the Pi. Storage is even more expensive, so if you attach a large SSD, the calculation becomes even better (but the 10Mbit might become a bottleneck quickly).
[0] https://www.linode.com/products/shared/
GekkePrutser|4 years ago
ciex|4 years ago
I wonder how they would feel if you add your custom electronics to the Pi's GPIO connector.
my123|4 years ago
vmception|4 years ago
Because that was my first reaction and thought it was a joke, like real, but done out of jest
Similar to how an engineer put a string concatenation function on a networked compute instance, NPM and released it on docker
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
smarx007|4 years ago
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.
walrus01|4 years ago
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.
whalesalad|4 years ago
Just trying to grok a legit use case?
KennyBlanken|4 years ago
The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is twice as fast (at least) as the G6400...so in theory a 5600x is twice as energy efficient as a Pi4 if fully loaded. Sure this doesn't account for system fans and the motherboard, but they don't use that much compared to the CPU.
The whole point of virtualization is that most systems are idle a lot of the time. At datacenter scale virtualization, you can dramatically over-provision and shut down/sleep unnecessary nodes, firing them up when you need to. You can get near 100% utilization on your hardware, making the very most of every watt that doesn't go to actually computing.
Here they're going to have a zillion Pi4's, most of them sitting idle, but still using a couple watts. They're not even bothering to use any sort of shared power to improve PSU efficiency. They're not even bothering to use Pi4 compute modules.
Now, the interesting bit is that now there's the Pi Zero Wireless 2. It has nearly the compute power of the 3B+, but the highest energy efficiency per watt of any Pi board so far...
flatiron|4 years ago
mysterydip|4 years ago
aae42|4 years ago
zamadatix|4 years ago
3xa|4 years ago
joosters|4 years ago
Installing the server anywhere else means there is a chance that its power is being generated by that wind turbine!
sgtnoodle|4 years ago
It seems a little silly to worry about where the specific electrons came from to power the equipment, though. If powering that equipment enables a wind turbine to produce more power than it would have without that equipment, then it seems like the existence of that equipment is "green" whether or not its power came from dirtier sources.
roughly|4 years ago
daneel_w|4 years ago
KennyBlanken|4 years ago
You can use dropbear to ssh into the Pi and provide the key during boot.
You can have the Pi connect to a remote system to retrieve the key.
Some methods are obviously not perfect, but it'll definitely make it more complicated than just "copy the card." Remote key retrieval would let you audit when the system was booted and so on.
There's a more complex purpose-built open source software package specifically for handling remote disk unlocks but I'm blanking on the name and my google searches aren't turning it up. I vaguely recall it had fairly high levels of paranoia in its design.
3xa|4 years ago
Encryption of your data is the key here.
john61|4 years ago
https://www.easyserver.at/serverhousing
jagger27|4 years ago
10Mbps is also excruciatingly slow. I was ready to see a 100Mbps cap.
buildbuildbuild|4 years ago
anyfactor|4 years ago
ushakov|4 years ago
https://prq.se/?p=rpi
erulabs|4 years ago
alexatalktome|4 years ago
I saw this and thought “can I use kube sail and host stuff in a mini cloud?”
3xa|4 years ago
daneel_w|4 years ago
Pi co-lo for just four bucks a month sounded great until the fine print was revealed...
projektfu|4 years ago
mbalyuzi|4 years ago
evan_|4 years ago
kingcharles|4 years ago
mr_sturd|4 years ago
I had two gen 1.5 machines hosted with them; one with OwnCloud, and another hosted my music via SFTP.
bullen|4 years ago
I had "free" colocations in Sweden and Holland that then turned not free then got cancelled altogether.
Pi clusters are best for home hosting on your own fiber.
Also those Pi 4 need heatsinks like so: http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png
Elyott|4 years ago
RL_Quine|4 years ago
systemvoltage|4 years ago
mkj|4 years ago
drcongo|4 years ago
3xa|4 years ago
However, we would have definitely pursued an overlap/commonality of the word with, say, beer!
sgtnoodle|4 years ago
(Look at their cad drawing of 12 pis in a rack.)
ZiiS|4 years ago
1MachineElf|4 years ago
paulcole|4 years ago
ruined|4 years ago
aofeisheng|4 years ago
> 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.
ChuckNorris89|4 years ago
I mean, not to disagree here, but that's pretty much the average internet speed in some third world countries, like Austria for example. :)
bogantech|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]