Waiting to run something like this on any hardware is a common request. That's why kong exists. It's openlua on nginx. It's ridiculously flexible and powerful. Best of all, it exists and is supported by a greater community.

IMHO, it simplifies things because now I can reduce my footprint by having either a reverse proxy and/or load balancer. That is, I can funnel requests through my reverse proxy before hitting the load balancer, or I could build my multiplexing into my load balancer cluster.

Regarding the tinkering use case, I think kong was created for specifically that because of the openlua foundation. It's meant for fail-fast development. Or rather, it's meant for you to be able to develop your plugins on a running application in just the kind of environment that a raspberry pi will create for you.

I think though that if I were going to tinker, I would use docker for tinkering unless it were IoT. Raspberry Pi really only makes sense when you have hardware you want to modify with software, but you haven't the means. You can forcibly add a software solution to your hardware (ironically with more hardware). For example, I want to connect my home security system to steemit and multiplex with kong/jussi on my raspberry pi, that would make sense. If I just wanted to try out jussi/kong to see how many apps I could connect before seeing resources constrained, I would use docker.

Check it out https://konghq.com/kong-community-edition/