If you’re like me, learning how to run databases inside Kubernetes sounds better when it’s hands-on, physical, and brutally honest. So instead of spinning up cloud VMs or using Kind or minikube on a laptop, I went small and real: four Orange Pi 3 LTS boards (a Raspberry Pi alternative), each with just 2GB RAM. 

My goal? Get MariaDB — and eventually Galera replication — running on Kubernetes using the official MariaDB Kubernetes Operator.