[Intel-gfx] [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Tom Stellard]

On 02/27/2020 05:00 PM, Tom Stellard wrote:
> On 02/27/2020 01:27 PM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Have you looked into applying for free credits from amazon:
> 
> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-promotional-credits-open-source-projects/
> 

Also fastly provides free CDN services to some Open Source projects:

https://www.fastly.com/open-source?utm_medium=social&utm_source=t.co&utm_campaign=FY17Q4_WebPage_OpenSource

It might also be worth looking into if the main costs are
coming from data transfers.

-Tom

> -Tom
> 
>> 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
>>
> 
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