Geekdom.social switched to object storage

by geewiz, 13th Jan 2023

Just in time after Twitter botched API access for third-party clients, probably triggering another influx of new Mastodon users, we’ve switched file storage for our Mastodon instance Geekdom.social from a temporary NFS server to our own S3-compatible object storage.

To this purpose, we’ve set up a three-node Minio cluster. Each node runs on its own bare-metal server and is equipped with two 1 TB NVMe drives. Minio automatically generates redundancy information so that an outage of a single node will not cause service downtime. This upgrade will allow Geekdom to scale reliably for quite a while.

We switched Geekdom over to the Minio cluster earlier today even though it’s a Friday, and even a Friday the 13th! 😱

With this upgrade, we’ve achieved our goal of setting up proper file storage in the first week after our holiday break. The NFS server still managed to cause an incident when it ran full last Sunday night. We’ll deprovision it within the next few days.

If you’re interested in the DevOps work behind Geekdom.social, be sure to follow my live coding channel Full Stack Live and have a chat while you watch me work!