A Raspberry Pi is a mini-computer board to which you can connect a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and install a Linux-based operating system with a GUI. Or you can use it in “headless” mode with no GUI and run, for example, a database server. There are many usages you can give a Raspberry Pi—from building a Minecraft server to smart mirrors, the possibilities are endless.

Since I started to discover MariaDB and learned about database clusters, Distributed SQL, and Xpand, the idea of building a Raspberry Pi cluster has been in the back of my head. A cluster like this is a great way to experiment with distributed systems.