I know nothing about what a BPI R4 is. My take : let the router be a router : don’t run container(s) on it. If you need containers: Take a x86 box, Run an hypervisor OS (e.g. Proxmox), create a VM for your router OS (openWRT, OPNsense, etc.) and pass through your Network Interface Card(s). Then run your containers on the host OS or in a dedicated VM.

That’s an impressive stack you were able to build. How long did it take you?

Man, that’s many levels deep.

Why not do both ? As I understand it, to do kubernetes clusters, you must have at least 3 hosts. They don’t need to be 3 different physical hosts: they could be VM (hosted on Proxmox).

Proxmox also having a very strong implementation of ZFS, then it could be used as the storage « host », and it gives you also the option to do snapshots of the VM (and the storage pool), as well as replication/etc.