How BlueSky was built
Quite an interesting and comprehensive overview of how ‘Bluesky’ was built.
Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges)
Bluesky is built by around 10 engineers, and has amassed 5 million users since publicly launching in February this year. A deep dive into novel design decisions, moving off AWS, and more.
Gergely Orosz
Section 6 is intriguing. The move from AWS to onprem because of cost. Also covers how they plan to cope with scaling
“Bluesky’s infrastructure was initially hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the team used infrastructure-as-a-code service, Pulumi. This approach let them move quickly early on, and also to scale their infra as the network grew. Of course, as the network grew so did the infrastructure bill … Cost and performance were the main drivers in moving on-prem. The team got hardware that was more than 10x as powerful as before, for a fraction of the price”
Cloud agnostic and maintaining an option to integrate scaling with AWS was key.
Avoid the lock in.
(I’m not a fan, they haven’t really federated yet. Threads has but I’m still not using that - no Meta for me - but I do use ActivityPub on the wider Fediverse)