AnilDec 12, 2022
Hey, everyone who follows me who is hacking on somethigna round ActivityPub/fediverse — please reply here and share a link to your app/GitHub/Glitch! Would love to show off all the creativity that's happening right now. (And please boost so your friends can share their projects too.)
Show threadMicah Walter
@anildash I’m working on sharing how to operate your own Mastodon server for a single user. Next step is to wrap this all up in a CDK project. But also, cost optimization. Mostly just my notes so far. https://www.micahwalter.com/tag/mastodon/
Mastodon - Micah Walter

Micah Walter
Dec 13, 2022 at 12:37pmWeb
Show threadJess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 13, 2022
@anildash @micah this is great. Curious why you’re just taking an ebs snapshot instead of a whole AMI? Wouldn’t it be about the same cost and enable you to launch the whole server backup instead of rebuilding the instance off the ebs snap?
Show threadMicah WalterDec 13, 2022
@kuxaku @anildash my primary goal was to provide incremental backup of the data in PostgresSQL
Show threadJess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 13, 2022

@micah @anildash Gotcha. I guess I like the AMI because I get the extra config data around t he instance too, so in an emergency I can more easily restore it. You could even just plop the new AMI into your CDK and have it use that to relaunch.

Not trying to criticize, just understand :) I've been planning on writing a CDK template for mastodon for the last week or two as well, so I'm interested in what you come up with!

Show threadJess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 13, 2022

@micah @anildash

Its a bit tricky in AWS if you want to keep costs at a minimum. I was thinking a Fargate service behind an ALB for mine - but obviously thats got a bit more cost than a t4g.small.

I'm mostly worried about what the bandwidth costs look like, it seems like mastodon is pretty chatty.

Show threadMicah WalterDec 13, 2022
@kuxaku @anildash I'm gonna do an analysis on this around end of January.
Show threadMicah WalterDec 13, 2022
@kuxaku @anildash if there was no rapidly changing data on the instance, and AMI would make sense, and would be nice to have in terms of scaling, etc. But, an EBS snapshot makes sense for incremental backups in this scenario.
Show threadJess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 13, 2022
@micah @anildash Wouldn't taking the AMI using AWS Backup also create EBS snaps for any attached drives?
Show threadMicah WalterDec 13, 2022
@kuxaku @anildash yes it will do that. But I think doing periodic (hourly) AMIs might not be a great idea.. I’d have to look into it but I don’t think they are incremental like an EBS snapshot, so it may cost a lot.. 🤷‍♂️
Show threadJess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 13, 2022
@micah @anildash I usually use AMI creation on a daily schedule, not hourly so I'm not sure about that. I think the AMI is basically just metadata around how to launch the instance - the snapshots are the same as if you were to just take a manual EBS snapshot. The AMI just knows to launch with those snapshots, instead of needing to manually attach them to a new instance.
Show threadMicah WalterDec 13, 2022
@kuxaku @anildash interesting! I’ll have to look into this. I do really like the EBS Snapshot lifecycle tool, which is pretty useful.
Show threadJess 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦Dec 13, 2022

@micah @anildash It sounds like what you've got works though!

Check out AWS Backup, I think it might do a lot of what you want here

Show threadFuturist Jim CarrollDec 13, 2022

@micah @anildash

I'm a single user instance

- Vultr 2GB Ubuntu 22.04, 50GB storae.

- an Amazon AWS bucket with a Cloudfrount CName so media comes from https://media.futurist.info reducing local load

Cost is about $12 a month plus peanuts for AWS.

I'll be putting email onto Amazon SES later today to get away from Mailgun. That will be about $0.01