What is the Fleet?

The Fleet is my Single Board Computer (SBC) collection. I started naming my original SBCs after ships during a project in college, and the naming scheme stuck, so I call it The Fleet.

This pool of devices has helped me test automation, networking, environments, and Linux in general. It’s easy to set up a VM with similar hardware, but over 50 VMs, all running different architectures, different hardware layout, different CPUs, that’s much more difficult.

This project was originally inspired by a project I started in college, where I wanted to set up a Raspberry Pi data center. I saw a few publications on ARM as a server, but I had never seen it done practically. At the time, the Raspberry Pi was really starting to take off, and during my construction I found Jeff Geerling’s presentation on the Dramble, a Drupal cluster running on Raspberry Pis with redundant databases and web servers.

That project didn’t end up going well because of several issues with kernel compatibility and the general stability of that era of Linux and ARM in particular, but I decided to keep the environment. Over the years since then, it has grown and changed into what it is now; a large collection of SBCs, with over a hundred CPU cores available.

I often post the things I do with the Fleet on my blog thing