If you are a software developer, DevOps engineer, or system administrator, you have a use case for single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. I spent 6 months actively tracking the availability of Raspberry Pi 4 until I got the chance to buy some and build a beautiful 8-node cluster to run MariaDB products on it. Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi devices are out of stock these days. Although they become available from time to time and you can use rpilocator.com to track availability, if you are lucky to find one, don’t expect it to be cheap (although this could change in 2023). Fortunately, there are alternatives, one of the cheapest ones being the Banana Pi M2 Zero.

I knew that MariaDB runs on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W since I had previously created a portable database server on it. But would the Banana Pi M2 Zero be able to run a MariaDB database? Well, yes! Of course. No surprise here since the Banana Pi M2 Zero has almost the same technical specs as the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: