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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.