We’ve been working on a new project in the office—a Raspberry Pi cluster designed to support our team’s development efforts. The goal is simple: give each of our developers a dedicated Raspberry Pi for personal projects and learning.
For now, we’re starting with two UCTRONICS 1U rackmounts, each holding four Raspberry Pi 5s with 8GB of RAM, 256GB NVMe SSDs, and PoE HATs for streamlined power and networking. That’s eight Pis total in this initial test setup, running on our 1GB fiber connection and secured behind our MikroTik firewall right here in our building. Down the line, we’ll likely add another rack or two to make sure everyone at the office has their own space to experiment.
With eight units up and running, our team can explore anything from building a web server to testing new tools or sharpening their skills. The NVMe SSDs deliver fast storage—much quicker than traditional SD cards—and the 8GB of RAM provides plenty of room for most tasks. As we grow the cluster, every team member will get their own Pi to play with.
Setting it up should be straightforward. The UCTRONICS racks fit neatly into internal server space, and the PoE HATs should keep things tidy by handling power and connectivity. We went with the Raspberry Pi-branded 256GB NVMe SSDs just for simplicity. All of this will be tied into our building fiber via our core MikroTik firewall that manages all of the internal VLANs and other routing.
This project is all about empowering our team to experiment and learn. Each developer’s Pi is a blank canvas for their ideas—whether that’s prototyping code or diving into something new. We’re also thinking about hosting some internal tools on the cluster, like our invoicing and time tracking systems, to keep things in-house. And who knows? Maybe we’ll even set up a Quake 3 server for game nights—because a little fun never hurt anyone.
We’d love to hear your thoughts! As we test this setup and plan to expand, we’re open to feedback and ideas for things to experiment with or build. If you’ve got suggestions—or just want to tell us what you’d do with a Pi of your own—drop us a line. We’re always happy to talk tech and see where this cluster takes us!
