The Raspberry Pi Dramble (which powers www.pidramble.com, run from my basement!) has been featured in a number of videos lately:
The Dramble was even featured on PCWorld's 2015 list of Insanely Innovative and Incredibly Cool Raspberry Pi projects!
After some more tinkering with the Raspberry Pi Dramble (a cluster of 6 Raspberry Pis used to demonstrate Drupal 8 deployments using Ansible), I finally was able to get the RGB LEDs to react to Nginx accesses—meaning every time a request is received by Nginx, the LED toggles to red momentarily.
This visualization allows me to see exactly how Nginx is distributing requests among the servers in different load balancer configurations. The default (not only for Nginx, but also for Varnish, HAProxy, and other balancers) is to use round-robin distribution, meaning each request is sent to the next server. This is demonstrated first, in the video below, followed by a demonstration of Nginx's ip_hash method, which pins one person's IP address to one backend server, based on a hash of the person's IP address:
We had a great discussion about how different companies and individuals are using Ansible for Drupal infrastructure management and deployments at DrupalCon LA, and I wanted to post some slides from my (short) intro to Ansible presentation here, as well as a few notes from the presentation.
The slides are below:
And video/audio from the BoF:
If first gave an overview of the basics of Ansible, demonstrating some Ad-Hoc commands on my Raspberry Pi Dramble (a cluster of six Raspberry Pi 2 computers running Drupal 8), then we dove headfirst into a great conversation about Ansible and Drupal.
Edit: Many people have been asking for more technical detail, benchmarks, etc. There is much more information available on the Raspberry Pi Dramble Wiki (e.g. Power Consumption, microSD card benchmarks, etc.), if you're interested.
After the Raspberry Pi 2 model B was released, I decided the Pi was finally a fast enough computing platform (with its 4-core 900 MHz ARMv7 architecture) with enough memory (1 GB per Pi) to actually use for web infrastructure. If not in a production environment (I would definitely avoid putting the Pi into a role as a high-load 24x7x365 server), then for development and/or testing purposes. And for some fun!
Earlier today, I gave a presentation on Ansible and Drupal 8 at MidCamp in Chicago. In the presentation, I introduced Ansible, then deployed and updated a Drupal 8 site on a cluster of 6 Raspberry Pi computers, nicknamed the Dramble.
Video from the presentation is below (sadly, slides/voice only—you can't see the actual cluster of Raspberry Pis... for that, come see me in person sometime!):
My slides from the presentation are embedded below, and I'll be posting a video of the presentation as soon as it's available.
On March 21, I gave a presentation on Ansible and Drupal 8 at MidCamp in Chicago. Video and slides from the presentation are embedded below:
Ansible + Drupal: A Fortuitous DevOps Match from geerlingguy
Human-readable configuration syntax. Great user experience. Designed for high availability and flexibility. Includes everything you need to achieve your development goals.
All Raspberry Pi models have a few built-in LEDs; the earlier models had PWR, ACT, and networking status LEDs all lined up on the board itself; for the B+ and model 2 B, the networking LEDs moved onto the network jack itself, leaving just two LEDs; PWR (a red LED) and ACT (a green LED).
Normally, whenever the Pi is powered on—except if the power supply dips below something like 4.5VDC—the red PWR LED remains lit no matter what. If you wanted to 'disable' the LED, you'd have to put a piece of tape or something else over the LED, or get out a soldering iron and modify the hardware a bit.
Luckily, with the Pi 2 model B, B+, A+, and Zero, you can control the LEDs in software, in a few different ways. The simplest way to change the way these LEDs work is to modify the trigger for each LED by setting it in /sys/class/leds/led[LED_ID]/trigger, where you replace [LED_ID] with 0 for the green ACT LED, and 1 for the red PWR LED.
For example:
I feel like I've been neglecting this blog for too long—the main reason is probably that most of my writing energy is still being diverted into finishing Ansible for DevOps (I'm in the home stretch!).
Some updates, during the interim:
For the past few weeks, I've been building a cluster of six Raspberry Pis to test and demonstrate Ansible playbooks for Drupal deployment at upcoming events (like MidCamp and DrupalCon LA).
I added an RGB LED to each of the Raspberry Pis that can be controlled via software (for example, here's a Python script to turn on one individual color on the LED), and as part of the demonstration, I'm using the LEDs to indicate which server Ansible is currently working with.
Version 0.9.3 of the Dramble—running Drupal 8 on 6 Raspberry Pis
I've been tinkering with computers since I was a kid, but in the past ten or so years, mainstream computing has become more and more locked down, enclosed, lightweight, and, well, polished. I even wrote a blog post about how, nowadays, most computers are amazing. Long gone are the days when I had to worry about line voltage, IRQ settings, diagnosing bad capacitors, and replacing 40-pin cables that went bad!
But I'm always tempted back into my earlier years of more hardware-oriented hacking when I pull out one of my Raspberry Pi B+/A+ or Arduino Unos. These devices are as raw of modern computers as you can get—requiring you to actual touch the silicone chips and pins to be able to even use the devices. I've been building a temperature monitoring network that's based around a Node.js/Express app using Pis and Arduinos placed around my house. I've also been working a lot lately on a project that incorporates three of my current favorite technologies: The Raspberry Pi 2 model B (just announced earlier this month), Ansible, and Drupal!
In short, I'm building a cluster of Raspberry Pis, and designating it a 'Dramble'—a 'bramble' of Raspberry Pis running Drupal 8.