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

2020-02-27 Thread Daniel Vetter
On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 4:38 AM Dave Airlie  wrote:
>
> On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 07:27, 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.
> >
> > 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.
>
> a) Ouch.
>
> b) we probably need to take a large step back here.
>
> Look at this from a sponsor POV, why would I give X.org/fd.o
> sponsorship money that they are just giving straight to google to pay
> for hosting credits? Google are profiting in some minor way from these
> hosting credits being bought by us, and I assume we aren't getting any
> sort of discounts here. Having google sponsor the credits costs google
> substantially less than having any other company give us money to do
> it.
>
> If our current CI architecture is going to burn this amount of money a
> year and we hadn't worked this out in advance of deploying it then I
> suggest the system should be taken offline until we work out what a
> sustainable system would look like within the budget we have, whether
> that be never transferring containers and build artifacts from the
> google network, just having local runner/build combos etc.

Google has sponsored 30k in hosting credits last year, these simply
ran out _much_ faster than anyone planned for. So this is by far not a
free thing for them. Plus there's also other companies sponsoring CI
runners and what not else in equally substantial amounts, plus the
biggest thing, sponsored admin time (more or less officially). So
there's a _lot_ of room for companies like Red Hat to sponsor without
throwing any money in google's revenue stream.

Or it doesn't happen, and then yeah the decision has already been made
to shutter the CI services. So this is also a question of whether we
(as a community and all the companies benefitting from the work done)
really want this, or maybe not quite.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
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Re: [Mesa-dev] [Intel-gfx] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread Dave Airlie
On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 07:27, 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.
>
> 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.

a) Ouch.

b) we probably need to take a large step back here.

Look at this from a sponsor POV, why would I give X.org/fd.o
sponsorship money that they are just giving straight to google to pay
for hosting credits? Google are profiting in some minor way from these
hosting credits being bought by us, and I assume we aren't getting any
sort of discounts here. Having google sponsor the credits costs google
substantially less than having any other company give us money to do
it.

If our current CI architecture is going to burn this amount of money a
year and we hadn't worked this out in advance of deploying it then I
suggest the system should be taken offline until we work out what a
sustainable system would look like within the budget we have, whether
that be never transferring containers and build artifacts from the
google network, just having local runner/build combos etc.

Dave.
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Re: [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread 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_source=t.co_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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Re: [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread Tom Stellard
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/

-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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Re: [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread The Rasterman
On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 22:27:04 +0100 Daniel Vetter  said:

Might I suggest that given the kind of expenses detailed here, literally buying
1 - 4 reasonably specced boxes and hosting them at OSUOSL would be incredibly
cheaper? (we (enlightenment.org) have been doing so for years on a single
box). We farm out CI to travis via gihub mirrors as it's not considered
an essential core service (unlike mailing lists, git, phabricator whch nwe
still run - we can live without CI for a while and find other ways).

The cost is the odd HDD replacement every few years and maybe every 10y or so a
new box. That's a massively lower cost than you are quoting below.

OSUOSL provide bandwidth, power, rack space etc. for free. They have been
fantastic IMHO and the whole "no fat bills" is awesome and you get a full
system to set up any way you like. You just bring the box. That should drop cost
through the floor. It will require some setup and admin though.

> 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.
> 
> 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
> -- 
> Daniel Vetter
> Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
> +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
> ___
> xorg-de...@lists.x.org: X.Org development
> Archives: http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel
> Info: https://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel
> 


-- 
- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --
Carsten Haitzler - ras...@rasterman.com

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Re: [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread Luc Verhaegen
On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 10:27:04PM +0100, 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.
> 
> 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

So this cost is all about fd.o?

I feel that this was not communicated to x.org members at all, when fd.o 
"merging" was suggested. In as far as this was a merge.

Luc Verhaegen.
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Re: [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread Matt Turner
On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 1:27 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.
>
> 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.

Some clarification I got from Daniel in a private conversation, since
I was confused about what the money was paying for exactly:

We're paying 75K USD for the bandwidth to transfer data from the
GitLab cloud instance. i.e., for viewing the https site, for
cloning/updating git repos, and for downloading CI artifacts/images to
the testing machines (AFAIU).

I was not aware that we were being charged for anything wrt GitLab
hosting yet (and neither was anyone on my team at Intel that I've
asked). This... kind of needs to be communicated.

A consistent concern put forth when we were discussing switching to
GitLab and building CI was... how do we pay for it. It felt like that
concern was always handwaved away. I heard many times that if we
needed more runners that we could just ask Google to spin up a few
more. If we needed testing machines they'd be donated. No one
mentioned that all the while we were paying for bandwidth... Perhaps
people building the CI would make different decisions about its
structure if they knew it was going to wipe out the bank account.

What percentage of the bandwidth is consumed by transferring CI
images, etc? Wouldn't 75K USD would be enough to buy all the testing
machines we need and host them within Google or wherever so we don't
need to pay for huge amounts of bandwidth?

I understand that self-hosting was attractive so that we didn't find
ourselves on the SourceForge-equivalent hosting platform of 2022, but
is that risk real enough to justify spending 75K+ per year? If we were
hosted on gitlab.com or github.com, we wouldn't be paying for
transferring CI images to CI test machines, etc, would we?

So what do we do now? Have we painted ourselves into a corner?
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[Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

2020-02-27 Thread Daniel Vetter
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.

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
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
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