Sustainable funding and maintenance for our infrastructure

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hello Guix!

We (Andreas, Chris, Ricardo, Romain, and myself) were having a
discussion about what it would take to set up a build farm similar to
what’s behind ci.guix: roughly 30 x86_64 servers, with 32-core/64-thread
CPUs and 128 GiB of RAM.  The reason for this discussion is that we were
thinking that we should not take our existing build farms for granted
and be prepared for the future.

The various options and back-of-the-envelope estimates we came up with
are as follows:

  1. Buying and hosting hardware:
      250k€ for hardware
      3k€/month (36k€/year)

  2. Renting machines (e.g., on Hetzner):
      6k€/month (72k€/year)

  3. Sponsored:
      get hardware and/or hosting sponsored (by academic institutions or
      companies).

Option #1 gives us “full control”, the downside being that it’s a lot of
work and a real burden (get crowdfunding for the initial funding, later
on to sustain funding to cover hosting, ensure Guix Foundation is up to
the task of managing the assets, and of course to take care of the
machines for their entire lifecycle).

Option #2 gives us less control (we don’t know exactly what hardware is
being used and have to trust the company hosting the machines).  The
upside is that it’s much less work over time (the company is responsible
for upgrading hardware) and less work initially (no need to raise as
much money to buy hardware).

Option #3 potentially gives less control (depending on the project’s
relation with the hosting organization) and makes the project dependent
on the sponsor and/or person(s) in touch with them.  On the upside, it
could significantly reduce costs (potentially to 0€).  If you have any
potential contacts, please get in touch with us (via the private
guix-sysadmin@gnu.org mailing list).


This is an important topic for the project, one we should plan for:
socially, financially, technically.  This takes time, which is why
preparation is needed.

What do people think?

Ludo’ & co.