Cloud vs Pi's: What Should I get?

Blogs

August 10, 2024

Time to choose - where is it worth to do SelfHosting?

Analysis paralysis - Choosing Small Factor Computer

Sometime ago, I was doing some benchmarks about Raspberry Pi vs Orange Pi and also about Mini PCs vs those SBC.

Lately, I have been giving a try to cloud providers.

Particularly, to Hetzner.

Is it really worth to SelfHost?

Or can we just use a Cloud Server for similar performance/price?

This is what we will be looking at today.

BMax B4
Raspberry Pi 4’s (2GB and 4GB) And make some conclusions

Asrock X300 and the BMAX B4

The Asrock has 1.92L (155 x 155 x 80 mm) size in volume, and the BMax just 0.6L.

What am I doing talking in liters?

1.92L are about 1922 cm³ - Similar to the displacement of a regular car
0.6L are ~ 600 cm³

Yes, they both are veeery compact.

You can have a reference a very popular referece, a pen:

BMax B4 vs Asrock X300 Size

RAM is not soldered in the BMAX, and also you can add an additional 2,5 drive (screws not included)
The SSD drive it comes with is not 2280 (I got surprised with that)

Bmax B4

Single Board Computers

And also, I got a new Raspberry Pi 4 (this time 4GB - ARM64)

Now that prices are reasonable:

Two RPI’s 4

There is a bunch of information on the internet: reddit, youtube and decided to create this post as both, a systematic guide and the results of testing that I could perform.

ℹ️

How to run these tests/benchmarks

What I the testing results include:
- Raspberry Pi 4 2/4GB
- Raspberry Pi 5 8GB
- Orange Pi 5 8GB
- BMAX B4
- Hetzner Cloud - Amazing internet speed…

Big Thanks to Alex 🙌 - For sharing the results of the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB

Power Consumption and Temps

Device	Idle Power	Max (Power & Temp Seen)	Power Adapter	Yearly 🔌 Cost (USD)
Raspberry Pi 4	~2/3w	6W	5V 3A	~$5
Orange Pi 5	~3/5~W	8W, 80°C	5V 4A	~$8
BMAX B4	9W	18W & 64°C, fan	-	~$14

ℹ️

Disabling Wi-Fi improves power efficiency. On the BMAX B4 by ~10% (~1W).
Calculation
- Annual kWh = Idle Power in Watts × 24 hours/day × 365 days/year ÷ 1000 (to convert W to kW)
- Cost = Annual kWh × Cost per kWh (USD)

At the time of writing, I pay ~0.2$/kWh

GPIO

No discussion here - The Raspberries are the absolute winners.

Also in software support.

I have to comment that I prefer BullsEye over Bookworm for the Pi’s for IoT/CV Projects

OrangePi 5 with Latest Kernel 📌

Installing OS with latest kernel thanks to Joshua-Riek
- Remember that they are not the official ones!
- I have tried the 6.1.75 version, which has HDMI support working
- Other 3rd party images: Armbian

ℹ️

You can boot RPi5 from NVMe like so
- The SD card will still have the boot priority (if it’s there)

Computing vs Volume

Device	CPU	GPU	RAM	Dimensions
Raspberry Pi 4	Broadcom BCM2711 Quad-core (4x ARM Cortex-A72)	VideoCore VI @ 500mhz	2/4 GB	85.6mm × 56.5mm × 17mm (0.082L)
Orange Pi 5	Rockchip RK3588S (4x Cortex-A76 @ 2.4GHz + 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.8GHz)	Mali G510 MP4	8 GB	100mm × 62mm × 18mm (0.112L)
BMAX B4	Intel N95 (x4 cores Alder-Lake)	-	16 GB	12.5 x 11.2 x 4.4 cm (0.608L)

ℹ️

It’s very important to use proper adapter or you will risk the SBC and its performance
The Amperes [A] info on adapters is the MAXIMUM they can deliver at a given voltaje [V]
- The devices will ask for less current if they dont need that much

Testing Results

Synthetic CPU Benchmarks

Sysbench

Results - SysBench 📌

Device	CPU Benchmark (4 threads)	CPU Benchmark (8 threads)
Raspberry Pi 4 2GB	~1.7k events	-
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB	~28k events	-
Orange Pi 5	~38k events	~50k events

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads=4 run

7zip

Results - 7ZIP 📌

Device	Tot (4 threads)
Raspberry Pi 4 2GB	1622/6311
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB	1442/5508
Raspberry Pi 5 8GB	2.7k/10k
Orange Pi 5	2.7k/11.8k

7z b -mmt4

Docker Build Time

Results - Building Docker Image for Trip-Planner 📌

I love using Docker for SelfHosting

Device	Docker Build	Max Temp	Peak Temp (Docker Build)	Avg Temp (Docker Build)
Raspberry Pi 4 2GB	~3672s	-	~46°C	~39°C
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB	~3480s	-	-	-
Orange Pi 5	~1777s	80°C	~65°C	~50°C
BMAX B4	~45 seconds	64°C fan	-	-

ℹ️

For some reason, the ARM SBC’s were using just one core during the docker builds (25% and 13%)

The Hetzner x4 SkyLake and 8GB RAM provides similar performance to the BMAX (when used to build the trip-planner container image).

Hetzner Shared vCPU (2x Skylake @2ghz) 4GB ~77s
Hetzner Shared vCPU (4x Skylake @2ghz) 8GB ~45s

Astral-SH Build Time

A comparison between the SBCs and Hetzner.

Building Astral-SH 📌

Platform	opi	rpi4b 2gb	RPi 5 8GB	Hetzner
Build Time	5min 20s	10min 7s	4min 30s	6min 15s

I have to mention that the Alex have way faster internet connection than me - which may influence this result

Conclusions

You have other options for hosting services, in the cloud:

Dev Focus Public Cloud

PikaPods Elestio

For AI workloads you will be interested in some cloud GPU:

Vultr Cloud GPUs VastAI GPUs Lambdalabs GPUs

FAQ

Testing CPU Performance - SysBench, TripPlanner, build Astral-sh…

#cat /proc/cpuinfo
#uname -a
#nproc
sudo apt install sysbench -y
sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads=4 run

7zip

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full
7z b -mmt
7z b -mmt4
7z b

and with 7zr:

7zr b -mmt1

Trip Planner docker build time:

git clone https://github.com/JAlcocerT/Py_Trip_Planner/
cd Py_Trip_Planner

sudo bash -c 'time docker pull python:3.8' #let's remove the time of downloading the Python base image from the equation, it was ~1 min!

#docker build -t pytripplanner .
sudo bash -c 'time docker build --no-cache -t pytripplanner .'
#sudo bash -c 'time podman build -t pytripplanner .'

Astral-sh Python Dependency Manager:

apt install cargo
#cargo install --git https://github.com/astral-sh/rye rye
time cargo install --git https://github.com/astral-sh/rye rye

Just simple stress test:

sudo apt-get install stress-ng

sudo stress --cpu  8 --timeout 120

Testing Internet Connectivity

ip addr show
hostname -I

#sudo apt-get install net-tools
#ifconfig

ping -c 4 192.168.3.1 #gateway
ping 9.9.9.9 #quad9

sudo apt-get install dnsutils -y #dns resolution
nslookup github.com 
dig google.com

sudo apt-get install speedtest-cli
speedtest-cli #speedtest-cli --simple

curl -sS https://ipinfo.io/json #the command to use
curl -sS http://ip-api.com/json/ #provides info about country, ISP, ...
curl -6 ifconfig.me #ipv6 info 

Measuring Temperature with NetData 📌

version: '3.8'
services:
  netdata:
    container_name: netdata
    image: netdata/netdata:v1.25.0 #https://hub.docker.com/r/netdata/netdata/tags
    ports:
      - '19999:19999'
    volumes:
      - netdataconfig:/etc/netdata
      - netdatalib:/var/lib/netdata
      - netdatacache:/var/cache/netdata
      - '/etc/passwd:/host/etc/passwd:ro'
      - '/etc/group:/host/etc/group:ro'
      - '/proc:/host/proc:ro'
      - '/sys:/host/sys:ro'
      - '/etc/os-release:/host/etc/os-release:ro'
    restart: unless-stopped
    cap_add:
      - SYS_PTRACE
    security_opt:
      - apparmor=unconfined

volumes:
  netdataconfig:
  netdatalib:
  netdatacache:

How to BackUp Properly

Whatever option you choose - make sure to have proper backups setup.

Why? I had to recover Portainer data the hard way…

sudo fdisk -l #get the drive
sudo mkdir /mnt/portainer_backup
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p2 /mnt/portainer_backup #mount the drive

#it was installed in the other drive with:
#sudo docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce

sudo docker volume create portainer_data
sudo cp -r /mnt/portainer_backup/var/lib/docker/volumes/portainer_data/_data/* /var/lib/docker/volumes/portainer_data/_data/
sudo docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
-v portainer_data:/data \
portainer/portainer-ce #now you can re-use your portainer, as it was

Hot to mount external drives consistently

lsblk #list them again
lsblk -f /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb2 #see the format and the UUID of a couple of blocks
df -h /dev/sda1 #you will see if its mounted

sudo apt install ntfs-3g

sudo nano /etc/fstab #forever
UUID=some-uuid /mnt/data_ntfs_500 ntfs-3g defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0022 0 1
UUID=some-uuid-of-your-drive /mnt/ext4_mount_point_folder ext4 defaults 0 1

For one time:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/data_ntfs_500
sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/data_ntfs_500/ #example with ntfs

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/data_ext_2tb
sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/data_ext_2tb/ #example with ntfs

How to use a RPi - Without a RPi

A raspberry Pi inside a container - https://github.com/ptrsr/pi-ci

A Raspberry Pi emulator in a Docker image that lets developers easily prepare and flash RPi configurations.

Cloud Interesting Resources

https://cloud.google.com/free
- PUB/SUB https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#pub-sub

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYIgcdIW1yk

AWS IoT - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgQ-Ewrm48c

I also had this saved (credits to BasvanKaam)

Interesting NLP Tools: PII, Sentiment Analysis...CSS like a Pro