Building Private Cloud with Turing Pi 2

I was one of the backers when Turing Pi 2 was on kickstarter, and received the stuff around April 2023. But at that time there wasn't any available rpi cm4 for me to buy, so the plan was postponed util just last Thanksgiving. I got 4 rpi cm4 4G lite version, and finally started to build a private cloud out of these.

The plan was simple, boot everything up, install some container orchestration (most likely k3s) and start to move my web services (probably also my GF's) to local. Just going full "self-hosted". But later I realized that there are much more details that I need to learn or deal with, including but not limited to:

Casing and thermals. Turing Pi 2 is supposed to fit in any mini-ITX case, but I have some personal preference and also cooling is another thing to worry about.
Supporting hardwares and compatibility. I will need additional storage (preferably performant ones) to go with the cluster but hardware of specific form factor needs sourcing, and there's some specifications about the Turing Pi 2 board IO connectivity and rpi cm4 compatibility issues that needs some attention.
Software to learn and try. Although I have quite some experience working with k8s from work, setting up k3s in a more embedded environment with all the networking, security and resource constraint to deal with is going to be a challenge to me.
The most underrated challenge is going to be finding stuff to achieve with the setup that actually make sense and meaningful. I have a handful of services that I could try to run on the cluster, but that's probably not the best idea for all of them.

My current progress is that I have a cluster with 4 rpi cm4 setup with k3s and ready to run some of my workload, but the casing and cooling is not resolved so not in a long-running state. I will update to this post (or link to new posts) about my previous setups and lessons learnt, and also new progress I would make in the future. Wish me luck!

2024/01/29 Update:

I have (finally) started writing the series, check here for a running list of posts :)

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