Member-only story

Building a hybrid x86–64 and ARM Kubernetes Cluster

Carlos Eduardo
10 min readJan 29, 2019

Since my last article where I built an ARM Kubernetes cluster composed of Rock64 boards, I got some new ARM SBCs with powerful RK3399 CPU's and also an Intel SBC called LattePanda Alpha that boosts a nice Intel CPU and 8GB memory.

With these boards in hand and my previous cluster in need of an update, I decided to build a new cluster with the latest Kubernetes version (1.13.1 at the time) also using latest metrics, monitoring and logging stacks.

This multi-architecture cluster demonstrates that it is possible to have a more powerful layer as the Master Nodes using AMD64 servers and smaller, cheaper and more power-saving SBCs as nodes. Some use-cases are Edge clusters or IOT applications. Also the cluster supports AMD64 nodes as well as any mix of architectures.

Overview

Hardware

For this cluster, I will use the LattePanda Alpha SBC as the Master Node and NFS Server. The LattePanda has a nice Intel Core m3–7y30 dual-core CPU (the same used on the 12-inch Macbook), 8GB of RAM and 32GB of internal eMMC storage. On this deployment, I’m using a 128GB NVMe SSD from Kingspec as the Master Node storage. It works perfectly and have an amazing performance. Also I have a 1TB SSD connected to the Master Node via USB3.0 where I provide the persistent storage using NFS.

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Carlos Eduardo
Carlos Eduardo

Written by Carlos Eduardo

Writing everything cloud and all the tech behind it. If you like my projects and would like to support me, check my Patreon on https://www.patreon.com/carlosedp

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

Nice write-up Carlos Eduardo!
We’ve been building our Kubernetes distribution called Pharos to support both amd64 and arm64 out-of-box. If you plan to re-build or re-test the setup, would be nice to see how it performs on these SBCs.

3

Hi,
Thanks for the write up. I followed the instructions but found that the arms worker nodes couldn’t join the master node. It’s stuck in pending status. I guess you have create a daemonset for arm . How did you manage to join the worker nodes?