Hi all,
As mentioned at one of the recent board meetings, I'm going to send out a request next week for sponsors to provide hosting services for us. Below is the initial draft of the request, which I'd appreciate your feedback on.
I've collected a list of places to send it, and will also post to inkscape-announce@ and inkscape-devel@...89... If you can think of additional places, please let me know.
Bryce
------------------------------------------------------------------------
== Would you be interested in hosting Inkscape as a sponsor? ==
Inkscape is seeking to improve its online service hosting. To this end we're soliciting proposals for donation/sponsorship of hosting services for the project.
The Inkscape Project is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization that develops and maintains the popular Inkscape vector drawing software, provided freely to millions of artists, designers, and other drawers of lines.
If you would be interested in sponsoring us through a donation of hosting service, we would be happy to add you to our sponsors page, with a mention & link on our main website's footer. Proposals can be sent to me as contact point. Our sysadmin team will review them and make a recommendation to the Inkscape board, who will make the final determination in about a month's time.
== Background ==
We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We wish to consolidate these services to one platform where they can be centrally administered.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future.
Ideally we'd like two distinct hosts, with one serving as primary and the other as a backup/spare, preferrably in geographically distinct areas (e.g. Europe and Canada).
== Requirements ==
Minimum Desired Required Ideal CPU: dual core quad core RAM: 4 gb 256 gb Storage: 500GB >1 TB (HW RAID-1) HDD SDD Bandwidth: 1 TB/mo 2 TB/mo OS: Any linux Ubuntu 16.04
* We prefer an actual machine (metal) rather than virtual hosting.
* UPS power backup
* 24h support at the datacenter -- A hardware technician would need to be available for handling hardware issues, to do OS installation/reinstallation, hook up KVM/IP if available, and to investigate faults that can't be diagnosed remotely.
* Server would be under the administrative and technical management of the Inkscape admin team (about 6-8 people). We would have root access to the machine for doing system updates and to install/configure software and services.
* We expect to be managing/maintaining our software ourselves. Items we anticipate migrating to this include (in rough order of priority):
+ Mailman3 + Mattermost + Wiki (mediawiki currently) + Forum (e.g. hosting for inkscapeforum.com) + Bug tracker (TBD) + Gitlab + Other project management tools + Website / Django
* Inkscape does not handle anything particularly controversial. No copyright infringing materials, nothing political, nothing intentionally offensive. Our windows binary has been false-positived by virus software in the past, but we clear this up ourselves.
* Currently our website hosting is sponsored and managed by OSUOSL. It's a root access virtual machine running postgresql, memcached, nginx and the django site itself. Memory usage is 450MiB per web host thread, currently 2 threads, plus 500MB for postgresql and 500MB for memcache. CDN is hosted by Fastly, currently serving 32TB per month for Inkscape (1:1.5 ratio US:EU, so more EU hits overall). There's enough dynamic content that we still see a decent load (1/2 TB/mo) on the server, notably around major releases (once every year or two); we are continuously tweaking optimizations.
Hi Bryce,
The details look good to me.
Martin,
On Thu, 2017-09-21 at 07:31 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Hi all,
As mentioned at one of the recent board meetings, I'm going to send out a request next week for sponsors to provide hosting services for us. Below is the initial draft of the request, which I'd appreciate your feedback on.
I've collected a list of places to send it, and will also post to inkscape-announce@ and inkscape-devel@...89... If you can think of additional places, please let me know.
Bryce
== Would you be interested in hosting Inkscape as a sponsor? ==
Inkscape is seeking to improve its online service hosting. To this end we're soliciting proposals for donation/sponsorship of hosting services for the project.
The Inkscape Project is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization that develops and maintains the popular Inkscape vector drawing software, provided freely to millions of artists, designers, and other drawers of lines.
If you would be interested in sponsoring us through a donation of hosting service, we would be happy to add you to our sponsors page, with a mention & link on our main website's footer. Proposals can be sent to me as contact point. Our sysadmin team will review them and make a recommendation to the Inkscape board, who will make the final determination in about a month's time.
== Background ==
We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We wish to consolidate these services to one platform where they can be centrally administered.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future.
Ideally we'd like two distinct hosts, with one serving as primary and the other as a backup/spare, preferrably in geographically distinct areas (e.g. Europe and Canada).
== Requirements ==
Minimum Desired Required Ideal CPU: dual core quad core RAM: 4 gb 256 gb Storage: 500GB >1 TB (HW RAID-1) HDD SDD Bandwidth: 1 TB/mo 2 TB/mo OS: Any linux Ubuntu 16.04
We prefer an actual machine (metal) rather than virtual hosting.
UPS power backup
24h support at the datacenter -- A hardware technician would need
to be available for handling hardware issues, to do OS installation/reinstallation, hook up KVM/IP if available, and to investigate faults that can't be diagnosed remotely.
- Server would be under the administrative and technical management
of the Inkscape admin team (about 6-8 people). We would have root access to the machine for doing system updates and to install/configure software and services.
- We expect to be managing/maintaining our software ourselves. Items
we anticipate migrating to this include (in rough order of priority):
+ Mailman3 + Mattermost + Wiki (mediawiki currently) + Forum (e.g. hosting for inkscapeforum.com) + Bug tracker (TBD) + Gitlab + Other project management tools + Website / Django
- Inkscape does not handle anything particularly controversial. No
copyright infringing materials, nothing political, nothing intentionally offensive. Our windows binary has been false- positived by virus software in the past, but we clear this up ourselves.
- Currently our website hosting is sponsored and managed by OSUOSL.
It's a root access virtual machine running postgresql, memcached, nginx and the django site itself. Memory usage is 450MiB per web host thread, currently 2 threads, plus 500MB for postgresql and 500MB for memcache. CDN is hosted by Fastly, currently serving 32TB per month for Inkscape (1:1.5 ratio US:EU, so more EU hits overall). There's enough dynamic content that we still see a decent load (1/2 TB/mo) on the server, notably around major releases (once every year or two); we are continuously tweaking optimizations.
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
So, I think that this is probably fine for a first try. But I'm concerned that we're limiting our pool of potential sponsors saying that everything has to be on one machine, thus making that machine much more powerful. If we can get it, great, I'm not sure if we should detail a little more of a plan B having multiple sponsors or a set of smaller instances somewhere (asking for metal seems like asking someone to live in 1990).
Ted
On 09/21/2017 09:31 AM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Hi all,
As mentioned at one of the recent board meetings, I'm going to send out a request next week for sponsors to provide hosting services for us. Below is the initial draft of the request, which I'd appreciate your feedback on.
I've collected a list of places to send it, and will also post to inkscape-announce@ and inkscape-devel@...89... If you can think of additional places, please let me know.
Bryce
== Would you be interested in hosting Inkscape as a sponsor? ==
Inkscape is seeking to improve its online service hosting. To this end we're soliciting proposals for donation/sponsorship of hosting services for the project.
The Inkscape Project is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization that develops and maintains the popular Inkscape vector drawing software, provided freely to millions of artists, designers, and other drawers of lines.
If you would be interested in sponsoring us through a donation of hosting service, we would be happy to add you to our sponsors page, with a mention & link on our main website's footer. Proposals can be sent to me as contact point. Our sysadmin team will review them and make a recommendation to the Inkscape board, who will make the final determination in about a month's time.
== Background ==
We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We wish to consolidate these services to one platform where they can be centrally administered.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future.
Ideally we'd like two distinct hosts, with one serving as primary and the other as a backup/spare, preferrably in geographically distinct areas (e.g. Europe and Canada).
== Requirements ==
Minimum Desired Required IdealCPU: dual core quad core RAM: 4 gb 256 gb Storage: 500GB >1 TB (HW RAID-1) HDD SDD Bandwidth: 1 TB/mo 2 TB/mo OS: Any linux Ubuntu 16.04
We prefer an actual machine (metal) rather than virtual hosting.
UPS power backup
24h support at the datacenter -- A hardware technician would need to be available for handling hardware issues, to do OS installation/reinstallation, hook up KVM/IP if available, and to investigate faults that can't be diagnosed remotely.
Server would be under the administrative and technical management of the Inkscape admin team (about 6-8 people). We would have root access to the machine for doing system updates and to install/configure software and services.
We expect to be managing/maintaining our software ourselves. Items we anticipate migrating to this include (in rough order of priority):
- Mailman3
- Mattermost
- Wiki (mediawiki currently)
- Forum (e.g. hosting for inkscapeforum.com)
- Bug tracker (TBD)
- Gitlab
- Other project management tools
- Website / Django
Inkscape does not handle anything particularly controversial. No copyright infringing materials, nothing political, nothing intentionally offensive. Our windows binary has been false-positived by virus software in the past, but we clear this up ourselves.
Currently our website hosting is sponsored and managed by OSUOSL. It's a root access virtual machine running postgresql, memcached, nginx and the django site itself. Memory usage is 450MiB per web host thread, currently 2 threads, plus 500MB for postgresql and 500MB for memcache. CDN is hosted by Fastly, currently serving 32TB per month for Inkscape (1:1.5 ratio US:EU, so more EU hits overall). There's enough dynamic content that we still see a decent load (1/2 TB/mo) on the server, notably around major releases (once every year or two); we are continuously tweaking optimizations.
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Inkscape-board mailing list Inkscape-board@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-board
On Fri, 2017-09-22 at 08:44 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
So, I think that this is probably fine for a first try. But I'm concerned that we're limiting our pool of potential sponsors saying that everything has to be on one machine, thus making that machine much more powerful. If we can get it, great, I'm not sure if we should detail a little more of a plan B having multiple sponsors or a set of smaller instances somewhere (asking for metal seems like asking someone to live in 1990).
+1
I think we should pay for a machine to get our mailing list project done ASAP. I understand it invites fragmentation, but if other projects need a mailing list later on, it'll be easier to offer them a slice of a paid for cake than a donation box.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 11:05:36AM -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
On Fri, 2017-09-22 at 08:44 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
So, I think that this is probably fine for a first try. But I'm concerned that we're limiting our pool of potential sponsors saying that everything has to be on one machine, thus making that machine much more powerful. If we can get it, great
Possibly. In my research in what other open source projects of comparable scale to ours have arranged, so this arrangement is not atypical.
I'm not sure if we should detail a little more of a plan B having multiple sponsors or a set of smaller instances somewhere (asking for metal seems like asking someone to live in 1990).
What we have today is basically what you describe - services spread across a wide variety of hosts and providers. There is overhead in coordinating each of these individually, knitting them together, and constantly migrating one thing or another. And with each service individually hosted, adding a new service (or upgrading an existing service) necessitates finding yet another host. Current case in point being the hassles martin and I are having finding hosting for the new mailman3 instance.
My ulterior motive here is to gain for ourselves a beefy enough host that we gain a huge flexibility in how we manage, add, and upgrade our services. Something that'll enable us to minimize the project management overhead involved and streamline the administration to enough of a degree that we can return focus.
And yeah you're right being on metal is soo 1990, but it's a well known, solved problem, especially when we're dealing with FOSS services. Like you say, if we can get it, great, and I think we will have a solution that we can rely on for years to come.
Now for plan B's, well as I see it we have two paths. Finding a sponsor to provide VMs seems easy - OSUOSL is already giving us this. Problem is finding one scaled up enough to suit our needs; what we're seeing is it can involve a surprising amount of negotiation and fiddling to get it to ample enough resource levels. I wouldn't rule it out as an option, though. I haven't yet spotted other FOSS projects with VM setups of the level of flexibility and capacity that I'd like us to have, but I'm always open to new data.
The second path would be to just go with a commercial solution. Either metal or VM, there are tons of options at reasonable prices, and while it would be expensive, we do have the financial capacity to do it.
Well, there is a third path too - a FOSS service provider. Unfortunately we've outgrown what most can provide, although I'm following rumors that freedesktop.org is looking to massively renovate their infrastructure, so who knows. Maybe, although I don't see any slam dunks at the moment.
+1
I think we should pay for a machine to get our mailing list project done ASAP. I understand it invites fragmentation, but if other projects need a mailing list later on, it'll be easier to offer them a slice of a paid for cake than a donation box.
Again, I totally understand the near term optimization to solve this one particular hosting problem as convenient as possible, but I think we win more by looking a bit more broadly, and hopefully kill several birds with one solution.
From my perspective, the resource most precious to us is our time.
Fragmented services consume our time inefficiently and unpredictably. I do like the notion of us providing mailing service to other projects, but my main worry is that this imposes a time commitment on us - perhaps a minimal amount, but non-zero, particularly if some day we find ourselves wanting to transition yet again. Not to say I'm against it, but I think there's tangible costs to it beyond just money that we need to take into consideration.
Does this thinking make sense? I don't want to proceed with putting out a request if I'm not convincing enough to ensure we're on the same page here. But if you are willing to give it a shot and will support this plan, I'm prepared to put this call for sponsors next week.
Bryce
On 09/22/2017 04:04 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Does this thinking make sense? I don't want to proceed with putting out a request if I'm not convincing enough to ensure we're on the same page here. But if you are willing to give it a shot and will support this plan, I'm prepared to put this call for sponsors next week.
I agree with you, especially that time is the critical resource. My concern would be that we send out an email saying "we need this." Then a month's time we end up sending another email saying "Just kidding, what we really *need* is this." etc. etc. I think we end up destroying our own credibility.
So I think that we should, in the initial proposal we should list but have less detail about options that we'd also consider acceptable. Worst case is that we turn someone down who can offer one of those because we got a better offer. But at least we don't end up running some sort of Dutch Auction of server donations.
You're better at text than me, but spitballing: "We need to have hosting for these things: X, Y, Z. Ideally we could put them on a single machine to lower admin overhead. We think that machine would look like: ABC. We'd be happy for other proposals or offers for one or more of the services independently, especially if they came with some administration support, but are hoping to keep things as simple as possible."
Ted
On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 04:59:11PM -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
On 09/22/2017 04:04 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Does this thinking make sense? I don't want to proceed with putting out a request if I'm not convincing enough to ensure we're on the same page here. But if you are willing to give it a shot and will support this plan, I'm prepared to put this call for sponsors next week.
I agree with you, especially that time is the critical resource. My concern would be that we send out an email saying "we need this." Then a month's time we end up sending another email saying "Just kidding, what we really *need* is this." etc. etc. I think we end up destroying our own credibility.
So I think that we should, in the initial proposal we should list but have less detail about options that we'd also consider acceptable. Worst case is that we turn someone down who can offer one of those because we got a better offer. But at least we don't end up running some sort of Dutch Auction of server donations.
I hear where you're coming from, and those are totally valid points, especially about keeping the phrasing flexible and more suggestive than proscriptive.
That said, I'm not too worried that we might come off as 'asking for the moon', though. Indeed what got me thinking solidly in this direction was a talk with MrDocs some months ago about Scribus' hosting arrangements. They have a hosting sponsor provision a hand-me-down machine, and their development team maintains their collection of services on it; it seems to be working out well for them.
After that I surveyed various other projects of stature similar to ours to see what they do, and found that Scribus is far from unique. In particular, I took inspiration from ffmpeg's hosting sponsorship request from a couple years ago[1]. I also took note that the projects were assertive in requesting the sponsorship in most all the cases I looked at, almost to a theme. So I draw confidence that we shouldn't be embarrassed to do similarly for Inkscape.
We're a good project, with a strong reputation and a history of good partnerships with sponsors. We know that there are lots of people and organizations out there that would love to help us in tangible ways, and this could be a perfect opportunity for someone out there.
You're better at text than me, but spitballing: "We need to have hosting for these things: X, Y, Z. Ideally we could put them on a single machine to lower admin overhead. We think that machine would look like: ABC. We'd be happy for other proposals or offers for one or more of the services independently, especially if they came with some administration support, but are hoping to keep things as simple as possible."
Sure, I'm down with making the request a bit more flexible. I'll try respinning it with this feedback taken into account. Thanks for the feedback.
Bryce
1: https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2015-July/176176.html
Does this thinking make sense? I don't want to proceed with putting out a request if I'm not convincing enough to ensure we're on the same page here. But if you are willing to give it a shot and will support this plan, I'm prepared to put this call for sponsors next week.
I don't see any harm putting the request out there.
Although if the FDO are putting together infrastructure, that may be a good home for an alt-mailinglist or mirror down the road anyway.
For me, being able to fold in the forums, an IRC transponder for Kiwi and a couple of other goodies would be nice. So I'm not adverse to fighting for a big bare metal machine.
It's just going to need a bit of leg work from the volunteer.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 06:01:40PM -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
Does this thinking make sense? I don't want to proceed with putting out a request if I'm not convincing enough to ensure we're on the same page here. But if you are willing to give it a shot and will support this plan, I'm prepared to put this call for sponsors next week.
I don't see any harm putting the request out there.
Although if the FDO are putting together infrastructure, that may be a good home for an alt-mailinglist or mirror down the road anyway.
Possibly, yeah. I'll be keeping pretty close tabs on this as it develops.
For me, being able to fold in the forums, an IRC transponder for Kiwi and a couple of other goodies would be nice. So I'm not adverse to fighting for a big bare metal machine.
It's just going to need a bit of leg work from the volunteer.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Bryce
Below is a second draft, taking Ted's feedback into account. If there's no qualms or comments with this one, I'll try and get it posted within the next week.
Bryce
------------------------------------------------------------------------
== Would you be interested in hosting Inkscape as a sponsor? ==
Inkscape is seeking to improve its online service hosting. To this end we're soliciting proposals for donation/sponsorship of hosting services for the project.
The Inkscape Project is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization that develops and maintains the popular Inkscape vector drawing software, provided freely to millions of artists, designers, and other drawers of lines.
If you would be interested in sponsoring us through a donation of hosting service, we would be happy to add you to our sponsors page, with a mention & link on our main website's footer. Proposals can be sent to me as contact point. Our sysadmin team will review them and make a recommendation to the Inkscape board, who will make the final determination in about a month's time.
== Background ==
We currently have various services hosted at a number of different locations with widely varying administrative capacities. We would like to centralize the administration of these services, such as consolidating them onto one platform. We also want room and flexibility to easily install additional services as we grow.
Services high on our priority list to migrate soon include mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki. Bug tracking, web forum and gitlab are potential secondary priorities. Our Django-based main website may also be worth consolidating at some point in the future.
For redundancy, we'd like to engage two distinct hosts, with one as a primary and the other backup/space, preferrably in geographically distinct areas (e.g. Europe and Canada).
== Requirements ==
We think that a suitable machine would look something like this:
Minimum Desired Required Ideal CPU: dual core quad core RAM: 4 gb 256 gb Storage: 500GB >1 TB (HW RAID-1) HDD SDD Bandwidth: 1 TB/mo 2 TB/mo OS: Any linux Ubuntu 16.04
We like the straightforwardness of physical (metal) hardware, but could consider virtual options if we can get similar levels of flexibility and expandability.
* UPS power backup
* 24h support at the datacenter - For hardware (metal) options, a technician would need to be available for handling hardware issues, to do OS installation/reinstallation, hook up KVM/IP if available, and to investigate faults that can't be diagnosed remotely.
* Server would be under the administrative and technical management of the Inkscape admin team (about 6-8 people). We would have root access to the machine for doing system updates and to install/configure software and services.
* We expect to be managing/maintaining our software ourselves. Items we anticipate migrating to this include (in rough order of priority):
+ Mailman3 + Mattermost + Wiki (mediawiki currently) + Forum (e.g. hosting for inkscapeforum.com) + Bug tracker (TBD) + Gitlab + Other project management tools + Website / Django
* Inkscape does not handle anything particularly controversial. No copyright infringing materials, nothing political, nothing intentionally offensive. Our windows binary has been false-positived by virus software in the past, but we clear this up ourselves.
* Currently our website hosting is sponsored and managed by OSUOSL. It's a root access virtual machine running postgresql, memcached, nginx and the django site itself. Memory usage is 450MiB per web host thread, currently 2 threads, plus 500MB for postgresql and 500MB for memcache. CDN is hosted by Fastly, currently serving 32TB per month for Inkscape (1:1.5 ratio US:EU, so more EU hits overall). There's enough dynamic content that we still see a decent load (1/2 TB/mo) on the server, notably around major releases (once every year or two); we are continuously tweaking optimizations.
participants (3)
-
Bryce Harrington -
Martin Owens -
Ted Gould