Re: Q2 2024 Transparency Report on Boost C++ Library

From: Sam Darwin (samuel.d.darwin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-07-20 12:58:56

> you could rent about 45 Xeon Gold 24-core servers on Hetzner.

Hi Boris,

The $7k was affected by a one-time charge on AWS Cloudfront that will be
reduced in future quarters. Much of the current billing now is CI.

Hetzner is a great hosting company. We have an account there, and this is
an interesting idea. Still, analyzing the number (45 servers), cut that by
50% or more, since the expected billing amount is less. And it's going
towards other costs also.
Let's say 23 Hetzner servers. The CI jobs we're hosting burst up to 500
simultaneous jobs. Is it enough? The solution is autoscaling (on AWS). I
explored autoscaling on Hetzner also. The problem is that you want to
create a disk image (an AMI) with all the preinstalled CI software, and be
able to quickly launch and destroy the instances, using the custom AMI.
However, Hetzner allows that to happen on a restricted number of officially
provided AMIs, and then when it comes to a customized image, that must be
transferred across their network. It was taking more than 10 minutes. Not
an acceptable delay. A CI job should be launching instances in 1-2 minutes.
I confirmed the delay issue with their tech support. No fix.  Nevertheless,
in spite of that, I do occasionally think the same thought as you: "Let's
launch 100 dedicated machines on Hetzner". Maybe at some point, yes.