Homelab

A Midnight node is a Cardano partner chain, which means it has to watch the Cardano main chain to do its job. It reads token registrations, stake distributions, governance UTXOs and bridge transfers from Cardano and folds them into its own blocks. The documented way to do that is to run cardano-node next to it, plus cardano-db-sync, plus the PostgreSQL database db-sync fills. On mainnet that’s 64GB RAM and a machine that takes days to sync before your Midnight node has even started. It’s an absurd amount of infrastructure to hang off a Raspberry Pi. But is it really needed? ...

My Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM had been sitting mostly idle for a few months — running the usual homelab suspects, nothing that really pushed it. Then MicroShift caught my eye. A single-binary OpenShift/Kubernetes distro built for edge devices, maintained by Red Hat, targeting exactly the kind of constrained ARM hardware I had on my desk. I decided to give it a proper shot. Why MicroShift I’ve been working with OpenShift professionally for a while, and the appeal of having a real OCP-compatible cluster at home — one that speaks the same APIs, uses the same RBAC model, and supports the same operator patterns — is hard to overstate. Alternatives like k3s or microk8s are fine, but they diverge enough that you’re always translating. MicroShift is a subset, not a fork. Anything I test locally maps directly to what runs in production. ...