Re: [boost] [infrastructure] The vault vs. project hosting vs. Boost hosting?

Subject: Re: [boost] [infrastructure] The vault vs. project hosting vs. Boost hosting?
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-07-21 22:16:07

[Somehow forgot to send this to the list, I guess]

on Sun Jul 17 2011, Dave Abrahams <dave-AT-boostpro.com> wrote:

>> Yeah, the idea of spending some money (which we've earned through
>> BoostCon) on our own host is one of the items on the steering
>> committee's agenda.
>>
>>> There are likely others, but those are the ones I'm aware of at the
>>> moment. Even though I appreciate the hard work it takes to host
>>> something like Boost. It seems that we can be better served through
>>> some other hosting. I recently found another university providing the
>>> same kind of hosting services we currently get. But in this case
>>> hosting is what they do, as opposed to something they happen do on the
>>> side. They are the Oregon State University Open Source Lab
>>> <http://osuosl.org/>. And they host a rather distinguished list of OSS
>>> projects <http://osuosl.org/services/hosting/communities> like:
>>> Apache, Debian, Drupal, Eclipse, Fedora, RPM, Slackware, and more. To
>>> me it's looking more and more that our requirements for hosting are
>>> increasing rather than stabilizing. And hence it makes sense to move
>>> to a provider than can scale, instead of sticking with one that needs
>>> to cut back.
>>
>> Whoa, definitely.  Is that something we can get for free?
>
> Just looked into this a bit myself.
> http://osuosl.org/services/hosting/details sounds *awesome*.  I'm going
> to inquire as to whether they would host us.  Can't hurt to ask!

Well, the response was very positive, and they have resources for build
slaves.  They've asked us for a few pieces of information:

* Will we need them to host our SVN in the near term?

  I think we should say yes.

* What is our estimated bandwidth usage?

  I'm not sure how to find out.  DongInn, do you have that information?
  
  I guess a significant part of our bandwidth needs are being handled by
  SourceForge.  I can see some information, e.g. at
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-binaries/stats/timeline,
  but I'm a bit at a loss concerning how to turn that into an aggregate
  number.

* "In general how much disk space and RAM do we think we'll need?"

  I know, this is a tough one.  I think it might be possible to come up
  with a number that doesn't include a projection for build slaves.  But
  how?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com