Merge 56fb6523a1 into e3d00bd75e

content/en/dev/overview.md

@@ -9,9 +9,28 @@ menu:
 
 Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails application with a React.js front-end.  It follows standard practices of those frameworks, so if you are already familiar with Rails or React.js, you will not find any surprises here.
 
-The best way of working with Mastodon in a development environment is installing all the dependencies on your system, rather than using Docker or Vagrant. You need Ruby, Node.js, PostgreSQL and Redis, which is a pretty standard set of dependencies for Rails applications.
+## Architecture
 
-Tutorials for installing these dependencies can be found on the “Installing from source” page in the Running Mastodon section of the documentation. Please keep in mind that root access to a machine running Ubuntu 18.04 is required. After following the installation guide in the Running Mastodon section, see the “Setting up a dev environment” page for further instruction on how to configure your environment for development.
+Mastodon's architecture can be divided in the five sub-systems depicted in the image bellow:
+
+{{< figure src="/assets/architecture.png" caption="Architectural layout of Mastodon." >}}
+
+  1. The web-server, who deals with the incoming HTTP calls from clients;
+  2. Mastodon's logic which implements the Tooting functionalities you love;
+  3. A job processing system (a.k.a. queuing framework) used by Mastodon's logic to process as needed tasks;
+  4. An "operations data system" which keeps needed information handy for quick access; 
+  5. A persistent data storage system where all those toots and cat photos will be written and read from.
+
+Because the Mastodon's logic is implemented in Ruby, as of now, all these systems are implemented on or easily integratable in a Ruby project stack. For instance, although one could imagine using any HTTP server or Queue framework, as of now, the default architecture uses [Puma](https://puma.io) and [Sidekiq](https://sidekiq.org), both Ruby libraries that made adding Web call-handling and Job processing conveniently easy to create. 
+
+In terms of data management, Mastodon uses the popular in-memory datastructure storage system [Redis](https://redis.io) which affords super-fast access to vital information like cached toot streams and Sidekiq's queues and its jobs. The final bit, the persistent storage, is accomplished by the [PosgreSQL](https://posgresql.org) for general data, and for media storage, Mastodon can use either a conventional filesystem or an Elastic Storage solution (a.k.a. storage bucket - initially created as the [S3 API](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/Type_API_Reference.html) by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and now implemented by most cloud service providers like Google, Azure, or Digital Ocean).
+
+
+## Development
+
+The best way of working with Mastodon in a development environment is installing all the dependencies directly on an Ubuntu Server, rather than using Docker or Vagrant. You will need to install all the software describe above -- e.g., Ruby, Node.js, PostgreSQL and Redis -- which is a pretty standard set of dependencies for Rails applications. You may also prefer to install your storage-components in dedicated servers, but there is a conversation for another time.
+
+Tutorials for installing these dependencies can be found on the “Installing from source” page in the Running Mastodon section of the documentation. Please keep in mind that root access to a machine running Ubuntu (currently on 22.10) is required. After following the installation guide in the Running Mastodon section, see the “Setting up a dev environment” page for further instruction on how to configure your environment for development.
 
 ### Environments {#environments}