Kubernetes migration for mastodon.nl progress report

Progress was made to get mastodon running in kubernetes next to the virtual machines in my mastodon.nl test environment. There was more fiddling involved than anticipated, but things are moving forward.

The container based mastodon services are now using the same NFS storage, postgres database, redis and elasticsearch as the virtual machine based services. This should allow for a seamless switch from the virtual machines based services to the container based services. At first, only the web, streaming and sidekiq services will run in kubernetes.

There is a remaining issue with the ingress controller, but once that is out of the way, testing the switch can commence. The test environment should be able to run with combined container and virtual machine based services concurrently.

When that seems to work predictable and reliable, this phase will be deployed to production. After production proves stable with the container based services, I will start preparing the next step in the migration in the test environment.

The next steps will be switching off virtual machine based mastodon services and then moving generic middleware to kubernetes. This should include elasticsearch and redis.

With that out of the way, there will be opertunity to start upgrading mastodon to release 4.3.x in a helm/kubernetes native way.