BREAKING: MINDS IS DITCHING AMAZON CLOUD SERVERS TO PROTECT FREE SPEECH

As a part of our work on improving the Minds infrastructure and protecting your Internet freedom, we’ve made a decision to migrate away from AWS (Amazon Web Services) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). 

We know this will be warmly welcomed by many of you given Amazon's history of suppressing free expression on the Internet. Oddly, they've never give us an issue, but their policy and history is problematic enough to make the switch. 

This decision was made based on a few major variables:

• Oracle TOS are far more free speech oriented
• Oracle made a specific acknowledgement of the nature of Minds speech policy in our contract
• Oracle offers serious cost savings

The migration process took over a month, and it involved moving over 5TB of data. It was only possible in the first place based on our fully open source and cloud native software enabling us to not be locked into ANY Amazon proprietary services. This will continue to be the case with Oracle (we will not become reliant on any of their closed-source services) so that if there's ever an issue we can easily move somewhere else.

We have successfully migrated:

• Our Kubernetes workloads
• Cassandra (Our main datastore)
• Vitess (MySQL database)
• OpenSearch (ElasticSearch search engine)
• Redis
• Pulsar

We also started using ArgoCD, which will allow us continuous deployment of code changes seamlessly and in an automated manner.

The Canary environment is currently running through the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We will be monitoring the performance of Oracle Cloud, and eventually migrate the production environment as well, most likely later this week. If you'd like to turn on Canary-mode for the latest Minds experimental features please visit https://minds.com/canary. 

We are incredibly proud of our DevOps team for making this happen without a hiccup (yet) ;) We developed all this code in the open on Gitlab here. 

If you notice any issues please keep an eye on https://status.minds.com and submit a ticket at https://support.minds.com.