Building a hybrid x86–64 and ARM Kubernetes Cluster

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.