The Pi Swarm Migration: A Progress Check, Not a Victory Lap
A measured look at the home-lab move: restored applications, repaired public routes, monitoring that follows the services, and the work still left to do.
A measured look at the home-lab move: restored applications, repaired public routes, monitoring that follows the services, and the work still left to do.
An honest field report from moving a self-hosted Docker estate onto a four-node Raspberry Pi Swarm: what moved, why Paperclip took two hours, what is currently degraded, and what remains.
Three Raspberry Pi workers passed media-access checks, but production stayed on its original host because proxy privileges remained unavailable.
A four-Pi lab recovered Linkding, PostgreSQL-only and Redis-only test workloads in 64.5, 28.9 and 24.4 seconds—with exact snapshots, fenced writers, verified data, and clear limits.
Same Pi, two storage devices, three repeatable read tests: our NVMe SSD delivered 4.9× the sequential throughput and 14.9× the concurrent random-read throughput of microSD.
Updated recommendation for two Raspberry Pi 5s and two Raspberry Pi 4s: three active Swarm managers may also carry carefully limited lightweight ARM workloads, while heavy and stateful work stays off the control plane.