gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Daniel Vetter]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 2:54 AM Carsten Haitzler <raster at rasterman.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 22:27:04 +0100 Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter at ffwll.ch> said:
>
> Might I suggest that given the kind of expenses detailed here, literally buying
> 1 - 4 reasonably specced boxes and hosting them at OSUOSL would be incredibly
> cheaper? (we (enlightenment.org) have been doing so for years on a single
> box). We farm out CI to travis via gihub mirrors as it's not considered
> an essential core service (unlike mailing lists, git, phabricator whch nwe
> still run - we can live without CI for a while and find other ways).
>
> The cost is the odd HDD replacement every few years and maybe every 10y or so a
> new box. That's a massively lower cost than you are quoting below.
>
> OSUOSL provide bandwidth, power, rack space etc. for free. They have been
> fantastic IMHO and the whole "no fat bills" is awesome and you get a full
> system to set up any way you like. You just bring the box. That should drop cost
> through the floor. It will require some setup and admin though.

We've moved away from this setup (all other fd.o services run like
this) because in a volunteer run org with volunteer admins, admin time
is a premium. So if we'd go the physical boxes route we could indeed
cut a lot of hosting costs. But we'd need to get a paid admin from
somewhere to keep the lights on. Aside from the money needed this has
the problem that X.org has zero experience with contractors, and SPI
as our fiscal sponsor also only just started with one part time
contractor.
-Daniel

> > Hi all,
> >
> > You might have read the short take in the X.org board meeting minutes
> > already, here's the long version.
> >
> > The good news: gitlab.fd.o has become very popular with our
> > communities, and is used extensively. This especially includes all the
> > CI integration. Modern development process and tooling, yay!
> >
> > The bad news: The cost in growth has also been tremendous, and it's
> > breaking our bank account. With reasonable estimates for continued
> > growth we're expecting hosting expenses totalling 75k USD this year,
> > and 90k USD next year. With the current sponsors we've set up we can't
> > sustain that. We estimate that hosting expenses for gitlab.fd.o
> > without any of the CI features enabled would total 30k USD, which is
> > within X.org's ability to support through various sponsorships, mostly
> > through XDC.
> >
> > Note that X.org does no longer sponsor any CI runners themselves,
> > we've stopped that. The huge additional expenses are all just in
> > storing and serving build artifacts and images to outside CI runners
> > sponsored by various companies. A related topic is that with the
> > growth in fd.o it's becoming infeasible to maintain it all on
> > volunteer admin time. X.org is therefore also looking for admin
> > sponsorship, at least medium term.
> >
> > Assuming that we want cash flow reserves for one year of gitlab.fd.o
> > (without CI support) and a trimmed XDC and assuming no sponsor payment
> > meanwhile, we'd have to cut CI services somewhere between May and June
> > this year. The board is of course working on acquiring sponsors, but
> > filling a shortfall of this magnitude is neither easy nor quick work,
> > and we therefore decided to give an early warning as soon as possible.
> > Any help in finding sponsors for fd.o is very much appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks, Daniel
> > --
> > Daniel Vetter
> > Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
> > +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
> > _______________________________________________
> > xorg-devel at lists.x.org: X.Org development
> > Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel
> > Info: https://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel
> >
>
>
> --
> ------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
> Carsten Haitzler - raster at rasterman.com
>


-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch