Architecture of Mastodon

The Architecture of Mastodon

• Mastodon
• Matt Rickard
• Ruby on Rails Web App
• PostgreSQL Persistence Layer
• Agnostic S3/SMTP File Storage and Mailer
• Redis for Precomputed Social Feed Cache and Worker Queue
• Sidekiq for Background Processing
• Node Handler for Streaming (Notifications, New posts, etc.)
• Problems
  • Rails does not have declarative components.
  • Rails monolith is harder to scale.
  • Rails is hard to serve at the edge. CDN can host static assets, but templates in the core RoR process render most pages.
  • All of these make developer workflow harder. Containerization, Kubernetes, and modern front-end stacks are challenging to work with in Rails.