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

[Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 18:18, Daniel Stone <daniel@fooishbar.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 28 Feb 2020 at 03:38, Dave Airlie <airlied@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> The last I looked, Google GCP / Amazon AWS / Azure were all pretty
> comparable in terms of what you get and what you pay for them.
> Obviously providers like Packet and Digital Ocean who offer bare-metal
> services are cheaper, but then you need to find someone who is going
> to properly administer the various machines, install decent
> monitoring, make sure that more storage is provisioned when we need
> more storage (which is basically all the time), make sure that the
> hardware is maintained in decent shape (pretty sure one of the fd.o
> machines has had a drive in imminent-failure state for the last few
> months), etc.
>
> Given the size of our service, that's a much better plan (IMO) than
> relying on someone who a) isn't an admin by trade, b) has a million
> other things to do, and c) hasn't wanted to do it for the past several
> years. But as long as that's the resources we have, then we're paying
> the cloud tradeoff, where we pay more money in exchange for fewer
> problems.

Admin for gitlab and CI is a full time role anyways. The system is
definitely not self sustaining without time being put in by you and
anholt still. If we have $75k to burn on credits, and it was diverted
to just pay an admin to admin the real hw + gitlab/CI would that not
be a better use of the money? I didn't know if we can afford $75k for
an admin, but suddenly we can afford it for gitlab credits?

> Yes, we could federate everything back out so everyone runs their own
> builds and executes those. Tinderbox did something really similar to
> that IIRC; not sure if Buildbot does as well. Probably rules out
> pre-merge testing, mind.

Why? does gitlab not support the model? having builds done in parallel
on runners closer to the test runners seems like it should be a thing.
I guess artifact transfer would cost less then as a result.

> The reason we hadn't worked everything out in advance of deploying is
> because Mesa has had 3993 MRs in the not long over a year since
> moving, and a similar number in GStreamer, just taking the two biggest
> users. At the start it was 'maybe let's use MRs if you want to but
> make sure everything still goes through the list', and now it's
> something different. Similarly the CI architecture hasn't been
> 'designed', so much as that people want to run dEQP and Piglit on
> their hardware pre-merge in an open fashion that's actually accessible
> to people, and have just done it.
>
> Again, if you want everything to be centrally
> designed/approved/monitored/controlled, that's a fine enough idea, and
> I'd be happy to support whoever it was who was doing that for all of
> fd.o.

I don't think we have any choice but to have someone centrally
controlling it, You can't have a system in place that lets CI users
burn largs sums of money without authorisation, and that is what we
have now.

Dave.
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