Raspberry Pi & Kubernetes On The Edge
College of Engineering Unit: 
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Project Team Member(s): 
Robert Detjens, Mark Ser, Jacob Balin, Nathan Hausman and Paul Lim
Physical Location at Expo: 
Kelley Engineering Center
Project ID: 
CS.081
Project Description: 

Leverage microcontrollers and edge computing to deploy distributed, scalable web applications.

Our team built a platform to deploy Dockerized web applications to a distributed Kubernetes cluster. We leveraged the Raspberry Pi microcontroller as our foundation for compute at the edge.

  • Currently, the primary solutions with using Kubernetes are cloud-based services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. While useful in many contexts, the proposed solution would be cheaper in the long term for smaller services. A Raspberry Pi cluster would have a one-time initial purchase for the hardware instead of recurring charges for cloud service providers.

  • The objective of this capstone project is to build a workflow pipeline that can take a user-specified config file and launch a containerized Docker application using Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi. 

  • This allows the user to utilize a powerful system that can deploy web applications or any application to their choosing with a lower operating cost compared to industry solutions.

  • By utilizing a Raspberry Pi cluster, the user can scale their workflow, either software or hardware. 

  • This project is targeted towards startups, researchers, and other groups of individuals that are looking to reduce their operating costs and reliance on cloud giants.


Industry Sponsor(s): 
  • Kyle Prouty