Re: Sustainable funding and maintenance for our infrastructure

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> skribis:

> On 2024-07-02, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> 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).
>
> This may be a little wild, but what are the downsides to doing some
> combination of all of the above? Maybe higher bandwidth requirements
> between the various pieces of infrastructure presumably being hosted in
> different locations? Maybe also a little more complexity in the overall
> setup?

Good point.  In practice we’re already doing a combination of the above
and I agree that there are probably advantages to keep it that way.

My understanding is that Debian does #3 exclusively, with sponsorship
coming from a variety of organizations.

Ludo’.