Brand New: The SEAL Pi Cloud Prototype

SEAL Systems has been working on solutions for the cloud for some time now. Especially with a security-relevant and highly available service like corporate output management, aspects like data privacy, fault tolerance, scalability, and updatability play an important role. We especially have to find out how our software behaves in exceptional situations:

Spontaneous failure of a cloud node
Termination of network connections
OS and software upgrades to cloud nodes
Updates to underlying cloud software stacks

In our experience, such cases can be tested neither on virtual machines nor in large cloud data centers under realistic conditions.

New Cloud Testbed

We have therefore decided to establish our own cloud testbed that can also serve as a mobile demonstrator for our solutions; a data center you can pack up and take with you. The goal was to get as close as possible to a realistic operations scenario with limited resources, meaning:

Operating the application in two or more data centers (from different providers, if applicable)
Deployment of the components as Docker containers
Orchestration and controlling of the application using Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or Nomad
Operational monitoring and connection to a company network

The Basis: Raspberry Pi 3B

For a technical base we have decided on a Raspberry Pi 3B. For a moderate price, it offers us not only good performance. It’s also very widely used, so we have a vast community we can fall back on. A design-compatible, Intel-based UP-Board is used for the more power-hungry components. ARM/Intel Multiarch Docker containers guarantee platform independence. Seven nodes are used to form each data center, and we have built two of these data centers and connected them over Edge Gateways. A chic acrylic glass case gives it just the right “data center” look.