It turns out that running an instance is *not* super easy
@qonnyr backups? high load adjustment? instance reaping? monitoring? paging?
(I worked in a devops/sre team: running a HA service with dynamic load isn't trivial).
@pnathan Not even close to that part yet, heh. Got sucked into a rabbit hole trying to get a Heroku deploy working, because I didn't want to spin up a Digital Ocean droplet. Probably should have. :P
@qonnyr my suggestion is actually more exotic: run an ASG over on Amazon with mastodon fronted by an ELB. when your node dies, the ASG will respawn it. the database can live over on RDS, provided it's not demanding unsupported pg extensions. Redis can be farmed out to AWS as well iirc.
@qonnyr then you can wind up a variety of stats: with sufficient dinking, you can do pretty much all you need.
I'd guess final cost to be ~~~100/mo? 200/mo? Hard to say, I don't have a mastodon instance stood up to estimate load / user + baseline load.
@pnathan I really need to migrate my high load projects to AWS at some point. That sounds like a perfect strategy for my CORS proxy project
@qonnyr hit me up if you want to talk about how to do aws right. that knowledge is locked up in horrible consulting blogs or obscurantist docs
@qonnyr naw AWS would be way too expensive for crossorigin :P
@tjvr But it might not be down for twelve hours a day then? :P
@pnathan That sounds really really cool! Probably not the best option for my instance - going to try and restrict it to people with @<my uni>.edu addresses so it's hyperlocal. Should be an interesting experiment!
(also 100-200/mo is *definitely* not doable on my student budget haha)
@pnathan (and hopefully hyperlocal <=> relatively small)
@qonnyr Oh supercool.
Get enough skillz with adminning and $200 will *definitely* get in your budget! Comp Sci?
@pnathan Yup! Doing a sysadmin-y internship right now, which hopefully will lead into some lucrative jobs later on. :D
@qonnyr o rly.
If you do that AWS migration and get it stable, you should feel really pumped about career success after graduation. that would put you in, idk, the top 5%, 10% of resume's I've seen from undergrads.
Might be the company I work for will have an internship next summer in their devops team (which is what you'd be wanting, I'd guess).
@qonnyr Wow that was *amazingly* incoherent of me, and I've only had one beer.
Rephrased: You can use AWS to drive an *almost* fully HA system with backups, etc, tolerate node death, and include sufficient monitoring and stats that you can drive things like texts when the server becomes unavailable.