Re: Sustainable funding and maintenance for our infrastructure

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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On Tue, Jul 02, 2024 at 04:24:06PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> 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€).
> 
> 
> 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.

Looking at Hetzner, they have an option to rent a dedicated ARM server
with 80 cores/threads with 256GB of RAM and 2x3.84 TB NVMe drives for
under €300/month and a €94 setup charge. Correct me if I"m wrong, but
that one box is ~20x our current active aarch64/armv7 capacity.

Also looking at our current infrastructure at MDC, part of the reason we
have so many x86_64 machines is because that's what was bought with the
donated money, not because we actually needed quite that many, so some
of the numbers might be higher than we actually need.

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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   רנשלפ םירפא
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