A first month: Scaling a 25.000 user Mastodon instance using Kubernetes
Dec 03, 2022
Today marks the first entire month of my being a Mastodon server administrator. With Elon’s recent purchase, a lot of people went on a search for alternatives, and they found one: Mastodon.
The critical difference with Mastodon is that everyone can own a social media platform, and at the same time, no one can. It’s a decentralized platform, communicating with other instances in the fediverse.
I love everything technical and jumped at the opportunity to start my instance. The days since were a wild ride. If memory serves me well, the first days went like this:
- November 4th: 60 users
- November 5th: 600 users
- November 6th: 6000 users
- November 7th: 15,000 users
You get the essence. It grew like crazy. Luckily, with me working primarily with Kubernetes, I decided from the beginning to set up Mastodon’s infrastructure using it. Still, I spent most of the first week getting bigger database servers and node pools. That’s also when I called for help from my good friend Mijndert Stuij. Combining our background, we have over 25 years of experience managing online software at scale.
Early on, we wanted to open-source everything we did for my now-grown instance, toot.community. Mijndert adopted all the infrastructure into Terraform, and I cleaned up the Kubernetes manifests so it was shareable with the world.
It’s noteworthy that after an entire month of running Mastodon, our infrastructure and configuration are finally ready for the world to see: