​​Section’s Latest Platform Enhancements Make it Easy to Stand Up and Deploy Mastodon at Scale

With just a few clicks developers can now create and scale Mastodon servers at the edge to ensure low latency and high availability

Section, the leading cloud-native hosting platform, today announced it is making it easier than ever to deploy and scale a Mastodon server; in just a few clicks, developers can use Section’s global platform to ensure a superior user experience at a fraction of the cost. With the open-source Mastodon software seeing explosive growth in interest and adoption, communities find themselves looking for solutions that can help run self-hosted social networks for a geographically dispersed base of users. Section’s platform automates the management of workloads like Mastodon using easily adjusted, rules-based parameters, making it ideally suited to easily distribute and scale these Mastodon instances globally. Simultaneously, the company has announced support for Persistent Volume storage, better enabling distributed deployment of Mastodon and other complex workloads.

“For those looking to create their own Mastodon server, the technical headaches, management decisions and ballooning costs that come with getting started can be incredibly debilitating,” said Stewart McGrath, Section’s CEO. “Even the so-called ‘one-click’ solutions quickly begin to show their cracks as communities grow and become geographically dispersed. Given the growth Mastodon is experiencing, this requires planning ahead – and Section has customized its platform to make it painless and cost-effective to deploy your Mastodon server at scale.”

Simplifying the deployment of Mastodon servers on Section comes with a number of benefits:

• User Experience: A primary consideration for online communities like Mastodon is the user experience, particularly the responsiveness of instances to end users and loads. The more centralized and farther away those Mastodon instances are from users, the slower the response, and the longer it takes to respond to shifting demand. Section’s platform makes it easy to reach a global audience, putting Mastodon as close as possible to users for a superior experience.
• Reliability, Scalability and Resilience: Two important considerations for maintaining Mastodon availability are provider network and cluster deployment. Choosing a single network or single cluster deployment also introduces single points of failure. Section’s global, redundant, federated cloud network and multi-cluster deployment automatically re-routes traffic to keep Mastodon instances running while also delivering the benefits of a multi-cluster environment with the ease and simplicity of deploying a single cluster.
• Optimal Cost: Deploying Mastodon workloads at scale can quickly get expensive and create major management and operations headaches. Section’s distributed global network provides complete control over workload placement, while its dynamic orchestration engine optimizes resource utilization to always deliver the best performance for cost outcome.
• Database Load: Mastodon consists of a Ruby on Rails backend, a JavaScript frontend, Sidekiq jobs management and a PostgreSQL relational database. However, as Mastodon instances experience growth in the number of users, this can cause a slowdown in how quickly PostgreSQL can process and respond to all of those new database calls. Section distributes the data out to where users and servers are located, leveraging PolyScale’s intelligent serverless caching between the Mastodon application front-end and the back-end PostgreSQL database.

“Global distribution is a critical consideration for modern applications, but it can create a significant challenge for DevOps teams when it comes to efficiently managing the underlying compute hosting and backend systems,” said Ben Hagan, CEO at PolyScale. “Section and PolyScale solve these twin problems with a few clicks, creating an ideal platform for deploying Mastodon at scale.”

Developers looking to get started with Mastodon or take existing deployments to the next level should visit the Mastodon on Section tutorial to learn how to deploy globally in just a few clicks: https://www.section.io/docs/tutorials/mastodon/.

About Section

Section is a Cloud-Native Hosting system that continuously optimizes orchestration of secure and reliable global infrastructure for application delivery. Section’s sophisticated, distributed and clusterless platform intelligently and adaptively manages workloads around performance, reliability, compliance, cost or other developer intent to ensure applications run at the right place and time. The result is simple distribution of applications across town or to the edge, while teams use existing tools, workflows and familiar rules-based policies. To find out more about how Section is revolutionizing application delivery, please visit section.io.

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