CoreOS on old iOS/Android smartphones

[Kevin Heatwole]

There are millions of old used smartphones (a billion or so each year) that are no longer being used as smartphones and really should be recycled and repurposed.

I just had an idea of one possible use case for these inexpensive obsolete phones. What if CoreOS were to be ported to be installable on these used phones?

Then a data center could deploy the smartphones as Docker nodes (even cluster-able using Kubernetes). These smartphones would probably make a nice isolated Docker host since they have battery backup built in (useful even if the battery only holds a few minutes of charge), are designed to use very low power, have enough Flash storage to install Docker and support running container images, and would be completely dedicated to a single CoreOS node (avoiding the noisy neighbors problem of running multiple VMs on a shared server). This would give the customer completely dedicated hardware to run CoreOS on which might be perceived as being even more secure than running on a shared Public Cloud server.

I have to think there are millions (even billions) of older phones, or phones with cracked screens that aren't worth repairing that could be sourced very cheaply so they could be deployed in a public or private Cloud and cost next to nothing. The industry could even come up with a standard server enclosure that could easily deploy hundreds/thousands of these phones in a rack. Add CoreOS and orchestration software and you could easily provide small private Clouds. You would still probably have to run your databases on large bare-metal, but the web/app servers would probably run very well on these smartphone nodes.

[Jeffrey Ollie]

I think that other than the labor involved, especially given how time consuming it can be to root the device and install an alternate operating system (if it's even possible, many devices weren't popular enough with the right sort of people for a root exploit to be developed) is dealing with heat. Cell phones weren't designed to have their CPUs/GPUs running at high speeds for long periods of time and therefore don't have good heat management. I can recall a few years ago putting my cell phone on an ice pack when I wanted to have an extended Clash of Clans session because otherwise the cell phone would shut itself off because thermal limits had been reached.

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Jeff Ollie