Erlang was created to run on a variety of systems. Riak (written in Erlang) was created as a fault-tolerant distributed datastore, able to run on commodity hardware. Raspberry Pi is the culmination of these two points, brought to an absurd level: an embedded(ish), very inexpensive ($35) commodity computer. I thought it might be fun to create a Riak cluster on a set of Pis I had lying around.