So, DockerCon! It turns out that building cool stuff gets you places. Back in 2016, I built a Docker Swarm from 5 Raspberry Pis by following Captain Alex Ellis’ tutorial and then went on to create two different visualisations for the swarm to demonstrate real time load balancing. This was picked up by Alex who got in touch soon after with the amazing news that Docker wanted to invite me to DockerCon17 in Austin, TX! I was incredibly excited about the prospect and asked if I would be able to give…

When I was 12, I was given a Raspberry Pi. For the first couple of days, it was really fun. After I had browsed the web for a while and played a bit of Minecraft, it sat in it’s box for a few months. I really had no idea what to do with it. That was until I discovered that I could build a website with it.

Although the PiGlow visualisation of CPU usage was pretty, we reckoned we could go a couple of steps further and integrate a much more complete tangible solution - a hardware-driven load monitor dashboard.

In my last post I described how I set up a 5-strong Raspberry Pi Docker swarm. It wasn’t long before I realised I wanted some ambient way to see how they were performing which a) didn’t involve staring at a screen and b) would wind up the cat.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine reminded me about Docker. Docker is a containerisation platform which allows you to deploy different systems very quickly and efficiently on the same host machine. Not only that, you can put several Docker hosts together in order to create a swarm. It’s like VMs, but cooler.