Pinode: Raspberry Pi in the Cloud

http://pinode.pythonanywhere.com/

by gpjt • 13 years ago

86 47 13 years ago

pinode.pythonanywhere.com

hjwp3• 13 years ago

love it!

TeamMCS• 13 years ago

Would love to see some pictures of the 'data centre'

lampington• 13 years ago

I imagine it would looks something like this: http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/004209/original/...

davidroberts• 13 years ago

I love it. See what happens when you click one of the "Buy" buttons.

subway• 13 years ago

Agreed.

I found myself halfway to a facepalm until I clicked the "Buy" button. Beautifully executed trolling.

sharkweek• 13 years ago

The bottom bit of copy was great -- but until then I was like "hmmm... is this real?"

3dptz• 13 years ago

Excellent!

I was about to close the webpage when I looked at more than just the bronze subscription.

gambiting6• 13 years ago

Or you could just buy a Raspberry PI, and send it to EDIS in Austria: http://www.edis.at/en/server/colocation/austria/raspberrypi/

And there you get FREE symmetrical 100mbit connection with no monthly payment. And you can always get your Raspberry Pi back if you need to, you just need to pay a few euros for postage.

gpjt4• 13 years ago

Holy crap, someone's doing this for real?!

gambiting6• 13 years ago

Yup. I've got friends who have their PIs there, works like a charm. I would send mine but I use it as a TimeMachine server at home. But tbh it would be worth it to buy another one and send it there just to have a remote ssh server through which I could tunnel in times of need.

aychedee• 13 years ago

Rule 34... Can someone post some shots of their facilities. I'm just interested. Ya know.

MatthewPhillips2• 13 years ago

This has been "out of stock" since right after it was announced.

gambiting6• 13 years ago

They do increase capacity regularly, just keep checking.

sltkr• 13 years ago

There are a number of other similar offers. Just Google for "free raspberry pi hosting" (+ your country, maybe).

For example, here's a Dutch hosting company:

   https://www.pcextreme.nl/en/
   http://raspberrycolocation.com/home/

You can send them your Raspberry Pi for free (or buy one from them) and they will provide free power and network connectivity (500 GB/month). Offer is valid for an indefinite period of time, but at least 12 months.

nodata• 13 years ago

It's regularly available. Like now, if you click the link.

wyager• 13 years ago

How do they make money?

gambiting6• 13 years ago

They probably don't make money on this service, but just look at their website - they offer tons of other services in few different countries, that's where the money is coming from. Their raspberry pi offer is more likely a promotion thing, because it costs them very little to run and attracts people to their company.

secure• 13 years ago

I really recommend NOT going with edis. I have sent my Raspberry Pi there and had constant trouble with it. It’s unreachable via IPv6 and/or IPv4 for long periods of time (days) and good luck contacting anyone about it. I will request to have it sent back soon.

All in all, this is not even usable for any toy projects.

gambiting6• 13 years ago

YMMV - Two of my friends have theirs there and they work fine as far as I know. I personally had problems with providers where I was actually paying money for their service, so there is no perfect company.

andyleclair• 13 years ago

I forgot I had this extension enabled: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt and hilarity ensued.

DanWaterworth• 13 years ago

I wrote a similar script that changed iPhone, iPad etc with bat phone, bat pad etc.

simpsond• 13 years ago

One of the best features of the RPI is integration with other hardware (i2c, SPI, GPIO). It's neat to toggle a motor from a bash prompt. When that goes away, it's just a linux box. It looks like you are having fun though, so I applaud that. Edit: I guess the joke was lost on me.

gpjt4• 13 years ago

BTW I'd like to thank the guys at Zurb for producing Foundation. The whole Pinode site took less than 45 minutes to write, of which we spent about ten minutes on the design and the rest on the jokes. And we'd never done anything with Foundation before. Definitely a fantastic framework for putting a product site together quickly.

nivertech• 13 years ago

Would you say that Foundation is better fit for marketing/product sites, while Bootstrap is better for webapps/admins?

gpjt4• 13 years ago

Can't say. We used bootstrap for our main product site and it was great. We found foundation better for the pinode marketing site but we've never used it for a webapps, so it might be better for those too.

jasonkostempski• 13 years ago

Shouldn't this announcement have waited about a week?

olympus• 13 years ago

This should have been saved for 1 April. It's good advertising though, and since it hit the front page of HN it's probably driving a ton of traffic to their site.

gpjt4• 13 years ago

We probably should have waited but it was one of those silly ideas you get on a Friday evening and we're probably never have got round to it if we'd not done it right away.

In terms of traffic to our main site -- not too much, 400 extra visitors or so. But that's not a problem, we did it because we thought it was funny, and put in the link to PythonAnywhere as an afterthought. Just wanted to share the joke.

That said, the Pinode site is running in one of our standard $5/month accounts and is handling a Hacker News front page (a few dozen hits/second) without even breaking a sweat. Just sayin'...

zenocon2• 13 years ago

Can I ask why (without trying to sound awful and steal someone's front page thunder)? If you want to do something interesting with the Pi you'll probably be wanting to connect other hardware to it. You can't when it is in the cloud. Otherwise, it is just a general purpose Arm/Linux board that has far less power than anything else you could get in the cloud-o-spehere...so I'm just genuinely wondering what you would use this for? Plus, the hardware is so cheap ($25-35 USD), it sorta defeats the purpose of HW in the cloud to save cost (hardware as a service, e.g. EC2, etc)..

theon144• 13 years ago

Try buying it :)

zenocon2• 13 years ago

[Edit] ah ok -- nice troll :)

cloudmaster• 13 years ago

As an alternative to low-end VPS's it's not the worst idea in the world at $5 a month. It'd cost more than that to upgrade your home's cable internet connection to be able to serve traffic decently.

nwh• 13 years ago

For $5 a month you could alternatively get a reasonably beefy VPS at DIgitalOcean / another provider.

may• 13 years ago

I so wanted this. :(

duskwuff• 13 years ago

Most of the power of the BCM2835 is in the GPU. A headless rPi is a waste of perfectly good silicon.

mschuster91• 13 years ago

How do you do the DVI video capturing? Framegrabbers and IP KVM modules are dead expensive, AFAIK - and how do you handle reformatting?

lcampbell• 13 years ago

Despite the fact that the OP is in jest, I found myself wondering the same. The best we could come up with at the office was to get some SDHC cards that are hardware read-only lockable (the spec says they exist [1], but I wasn't able to find any to purchase). On these SDHC cards, you stick a PXE-like implementation that allows it to pull a disk image off another machine in the DC, install it to an attached USB drive, then chainboot to that disk.

This setup would allow customers to upload an image which is effectively burned and attached to the hardware during an automated provisioning process. When the node is powered down, the USB drive is wiped by the next provisioning.

The customer is expected to set up the image so that it provides ssh (or what have you) on boot. Since the failure state of, say, a kernel panic in this setup is complete data loss, there's no need for KVM or anything.

It probably wouldn't be a very competitive service, but as mentioned elsewhere, for $5/month most applications are likely better off with a VPS anyway.

[1] http://superuser.com/questions/354473/is-the-lock-mechanism-...

lsc2• 13 years ago

eh, I've been looking at doing something like this (hosting PI units) and the OOB solution I'm considering is soldering on a serial console.

I would also need to figure out some automated bootloader setup, of course.

jnw2• 13 years ago

Maybe you should pay to have built a batch of a thousand custom boards that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the standard Raspberry Pi, so that they have a proper serial port etc.

You could also consider putting more than one ARM computer on each board (at which point maybe you want fewer than a thousand boards) and building an ethernet switch into that board, etc, and maybe you could even hardwire all the serial lines within the board, etc.

DigitalDesignDj• 13 years ago

I call BS, I would really like to see someone prove that these are all really raspi units and not just Debian Squeeze instances running on a virtual server.

Also, I have a raspi myself. The beauty of the raspi is not that you get to eat the pie, its that you get to make it yourself. Cloud connected? I think you mean Internet, not cloud. You know, unless these are Debian Squeezes on a virtualized box. Don't have the time? Then you can't have this hobby. End of rant.

chuable• 13 years ago

Click the buy button then come back and rant some more.

Pinode: Raspberry Pi in the Cloud

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