FreeDesktop.org financial situation regarding cloud hosting for Gitlab

gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

Daniel Vetter daniel.vetter at ffwll.ch

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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 - <a href="http://blog.ffwll.ch">http://blog.ffwll.ch</a>

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