Mastodon.nl upgrade to 4.3.x - progress update

So the plan was to set up a mostly proper kubernetes cluster, move mastodon.nl onto it and then migrate to mastodon 4.3.2

But tests showed there were performance issues to address and right now I've already spent the amount of time that I can on working on the nuts and bolts of mastodon.nl. So the situation was discussed with our infra sponsor last week or maybe it was already two weeks ago.

The way forward will be first upgrading mastodon.nl on a virtual machines based setup. As an inplace upgrade on top of Debian 11 proved tacky months ago, the infra sponsor will supply new Debian 12 virtual machines on top of their Proxmox offering to replace the Debian 11 machines running on top of xcpng / xen.

This weekend I finished the ansible code to deploy mastodon and all its settings/dependencies to a Debian 12 based virtual machine in my testlab. As soon as the new virtual machines are available in our production environment, deploying the code should be doable within an hour. Then we can start planning the actual upgrade, which mostly comes down to:

• bringing down current web and sidekiq servers
• running database backup
• running database migrations
• bringing up new web and sidekiq servers

I will try to keep you updated of further progress