Re: Sustainable funding and maintenance for our infrastructure

[indieterminacy <indieterminacy@libre.brussels>]

Hello,

Its worth pointing out the work of OpenBSD Amsterdam - which has raised 
over €40k for its respective foundation.

Its approach is to donate €10 per VM and €15 per VM renewal and has 850 
VMs.

Here are details on its hardware:
https://openbsd.amsterdam/hardware.html

It references this:
> Dell PowerEdge R630 w/ 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 0 @ 3.20GHz
> 384G RAM
> Dell PERC H730 Mini

Hopefully such a long established initiative can provide some 
benchmarking approaches and ideas.
The lead behind it is very accomidating and knowlegable.

It also is used as a mechanism for highlighting projects they host:
https://openbsd.amsterdam/runs.html

Kind regards,


Jonathan

On 2024-07-02 10:24, 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.