In case you aren't aware, there are plenty of tutorials out there that help you get a raspberry pi to boot from USB, which allows you to use any HD there is.

Moreover, nothing stops you from getting everything to run on a RAM drive. There are raspberry pis with 8GB of RAM on the market right now.

Having said that, an official raspberry pi SD card with 16GB is sold for 10$. Not exactly something that pushes you to bankruptcy.

This isn't docker, it's containerd and once deployed this is mostly read-only. You can also mount a USB hard drive of NVMe over USB if you want.

Personally, I netboot my RPis, and faasd works equally well on the public cloud.

> it will be faulty way sooner because lots of I/O

It all makes sense now. One of my first computing projects was making a small cluster computer with raspberry PI boards. I noticed that the SD cards started to fail oddly fast. Most likely since they were all either swam nodes, or a swarm controller.

Just map /var/lib/docker to another storage location, then.

What is it about Docker that makes it so much worse?

Been running Home Assistant via Docker (Hassio) 24/7 for over two years now, off the same sd-card on my Raspberry Pi 3B, no issues so far.

The difference might be (besides card quality) the amount of free space on the card. If you are churning through the same 500MB with your temporary files you will wear the card off much faster compared to spreading the same IO over 5GB of empty space.

A lot of RPis are running on non-SD storage or durable SD Cards.

New raspberry pi 4s can boot from usb out of the box since a month or two ago.

I do agree with you.

However, I think pi sd cards get a bad rap because of marginal power supplies (very common before pi 4) and unclean shutdowns.

I had a card become corrupted and reformatting it did the trick since then.

I had a Pi which was very unstable. Measured the USB cable, supposedly a charging cable, and it had 1 Ohm resistance! Replaced it with a proper one and rock solid since.