With all the backlash1 surrounding Reddit’s unpopular decision to restrict their API while effectively killing most of the 3rd party apps in the process, many started wondering whether Reddit should remain their “front page of the Internet” and maybe even started to explore alternatives.
Background ...
I also use kubernetes to run my Lemmy instance. Sadly, pictrs uses their own "database" file which can only be opened by a single pod because it refuse to run if the "database" lock is already acquired by another pod, making scaling up the number of pods impossible. I wish they use postgres instead of inventing their own database. I suspect this is one of the reasons why those large Lemmy instances have difficulty scaling up their server.
You mean pictrs can't scale, or the other pods cannot as well? I separated lemmy-ui, the backend, and pictrs into different pods. Haven't tried scaling anything yet though, but I did notice the database issue with pictrs when RollingRestart, had to switch to Recreate.
So far it's working quite well, however for a micro-sized instance it's no surprise. Worst case scenario I can do the same thing as the admins of lemmy.world did: create a dedicated scheduling pod using the same docker image as the normal ones, but exclude it from the Service's target, so it won't receive any incoming traffic.
The rest of the pods can then be dedicated to serve traffic with their scheduling functionality disabled.