Part 0: Building a Self-Hosted Cloud on Raspberry Pis

Who Am I?

Hey there! I'm Charan, a 2nd-year student pursuing Computer Science Engineering at R.V. College of Engineering. My interest in Linux and Networking lead me deep into the world of DevOps, cloud and self-hosting.

How It All Started?

I’ve always been someone who loves making things work, whether it’s setting up Networks, self hosting, tinkering with Linux or automating tasks. I enjoy the process of breaking things and understanding how they work. My curiosity led me to start a homelab. I began with my old laptop and a router, but things didn’t grow as planned.

Luckily, I got the opportunity to join one of my college's Centers of Excellence-IoT Lab. Here, we took on an exciting project: Building a Raspberry Pi cluster to set up a DevOps Lab!

The idea was simple but exciting:
🔹 Provide a self-hosted environment where students can practice and learn DevOps.
🔹 Provide an alternative for the expensive cloud services.
🔹 Make it easy to experiment with Kubernetes, CI/CD, monitoring tools, and automation without worrying about cloud costs!

Our Goals

As of now we are still working on this project and till now the journey has been exciting and I thought of documenting it and hence started this series. So, in this blog series, I’ll be sharing:

• How we built the Raspberry Pi Cluster.

• The DevOps tools we deployed.

• The services we are offering.

• Any challenges we face and how we solve them.

Our Plans:

We have currently planned to set up the following:

• Kubernetes Cluster - To deploy and manage services

• VPN server - For secure remote access to our pi cloud

• MinIO - Object storage similar to AWS’s S3 bucket

• NAS - A network attached Storage

• Gitea - Code hosting platform similar to GitHub

• Jenkins - CI/CD automation

• APT Mirror - Local Package repository to reduce external bandwidth.

• Monitoring and Logging - Prometheus and Grafana

Stay tuned for Part 1: Setting Up the Raspberry Pi Cluster!