gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Jan,

On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 10:09, Jan Engelhardt <jengelh at inai.de> wrote:
> On Friday 2020-02-28 08:59, Daniel Stone wrote:
> >I believe that in January, we had $2082 of network cost (almost
> >entirely egress; ingress is basically free) and $1750 of
> >cloud-storage cost (almost all of which was download). That's based
> >on 16TB of cloud-storage (CI artifacts, container images, file
> >uploads, Git LFS) egress and 17.9TB of other egress (the web service
> >itself, repo activity). Projecting that out [×12 for a year] gives
> >us roughly $45k of network activity alone,
>
> I had come to a similar conclusion a few years back: It is not very
> economic to run ephemereal buildroots (and anything like it) between
> two (or more) "significant locations" of which one end is located in
> a Large Cloud datacenter like EC2/AWS/etc.
>
> As for such usecases, me and my surrounding peers have used (other)
> offerings where there is 50 TB free network/month, and yes that may
> have entailed doing more adminning than elsewhere - but an admin
> appreciates $2000 a lot more than a corporation, too.

Yes, absolutely. For context, our storage & network costs have
increased >10x in the past 12 months (~$320 Jan 2019), >3x in the past
6 months (~$1350 July 2019), and ~2x in the past 3 months (~$2000 Oct
2019).

I do now (personally) think that it's crossed the point at which it
would be worthwhile paying an admin to solve the problems that cloud
services currently solve for us - which wasn't true before. Such an
admin could also deal with things like our SMTP delivery failure rate,
which in the past year has spiked over 50% (see previous email),
demand for new services such as Discourse which will enable user
support without either a) users having to subscribe to a mailing list,
or b) bug trackers being cluttered up with user requests and other
non-bugs, etc.

Cheers,
Daniel