Stéphane was very helpful to me on the Linux Containers forum[1] when I was just getting started with LXD. We now use it in production for Ark[2] and run each of our apps in separate LXD instances across our physical nodes. It's stable and it just works.
So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys!
Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :)
In our case each node's ZFS store operates independently, it's not shared. We spin up "VMs" (LXC based) on each node and they talk to each via our private network. Hope that helps!
Running in production for about 3 years with Ubuntu 20.04 / zfs 0.8.3. ZFS is being used as the datastore for a cluster of LXD/LXC instances over multiple physical hosts. I have the OS setup on its own dedicated drive and ZFS striped/cloned over 4 NVMe drives.
edit: one thing I forgot to mention is, when creating your pool make sure to import your drives by ID (zpool import -d /dev/disk/by-id/ <poolname>) instead of name in case name assignments change somehow [1]
I do appreciate the response and feedback. You are right, the network effect is the hardest challenge to a social platform. A way to bootstrap is to treat Glue as a "blog" or a personal website where one can post content in a stand-alone manner, while hosting it under their own domain so it feels like a personal website. I haven't really done any marketing to this effect, but I probably should.
Regarding distributed protocols: I am interested/watching those, especially the domain based handles, to see if there is a way to integrate as Glue already supports custom domains. Short answer: Yes, I'm watching to see if there are ways that fit Glue's use-case to tap into those protocols.
Glue is one app in an ecosystem of apps I'm working on under Ark (https://ark.fm): Pingly: email / calendar / team chat, Glue: social networking / blogging and a third in progress. I haven't really said what Ark is going to be as what connects all these apps is still in works and honestly is evolving as I go :)
Can speak to the DB side of things:
Redis in front of an RDBMS scaled well for me at https://glue.im/noah
Timlines/activity are built from the RDBMS and served from Redis as a cache. New posts are added to the cache directly as well so only needs to rebuild if you lose the entire cache which only happens if we need to restart the server. Also not storing full posts in Redis, just IDs, pulling via primary key from DB is very fast.
That same setup was used for a previous app that had a few million user base (don’t remember the concurrent user numbers though) and it ran well with a clear path to scale it up.
More thoughts: build a mobile friendly web app first, you’re gonna need some sort of back-end to run the iOS app anyways and tweaking a web app UI is much quicker than resubmitting iOS builds to the App Store.
We use it in production for our products at https://ark.fm and are actively working to move all of our Rails apps over to Crystal which ironically this framework looks great and may be a good choice for us. (Thank you to the author!)
Our email service runs an image proxy (to hide your IP from email trackers) with probably about 30-50 lines of code in Crystal that's been in production for multiple years and it just works.
Current project (in the cloud hosting space) that will heavily use Crystal for backend management and WASM which was recently introduced into Crystal and is a game changer for our use-case.
Also wrote a command-line tool with it and it feels like I'm cheating at how easy it is to do so.
Coming from the Ruby/Rails world where you have to cap deploy/bundle etc to push to a production server and hoping nothing breaks on dependancies makes Crystal's single binary deploy a breath of fresh air...not to mention the performance. We run our own hardware so being able to (eventually once we've moved over fully to Crystal) run the same workloads on LESS hardware with electric prices spiking is financially attractive.
As you can tell I'm a fan boy. I'm betting heavily on Crystal and going all in with our stack.