Hi Philip,
Thank you for your analysis and proposals so far!
see my (probably dumb) questions below..
> Or for running a hypervisor with one VM for gitlab and maybe others
> for other services?
I'd suggest to use Docker instead - according to our measurements,
a VM layer costs 15-25% of performance,
and having everything available in one filesystem makes backups much
easier.
We might need VMs for cross-builds anyway, though,
if we want to support that at some time.
(Or at least qemu-static-<arch> - might be easier to handle)
I'm not sure what qemu-static-<arch> means.
What platforms would you have in mind to support for cross-builds?
I assume each platform would add to CPU/RAM/disk requirements. Query whether to size for that eventuality now or later.
Philip could you go ahead and set up one document for this migration effort, in a place you find handy? If cryptpad will do what we need for now then let it be cryptpad. The cryptpad would be not such much for discussion (this mailing list can play that role for now) but more as a live to-do list with up to date status (I don't know if that's formatted like an org-mode list or what).
In addition to HA (High Availability) and external monitoring, I can imagine just a couple reasons we might want to maintain separate hosts:
1. To have a dedicated build host just for running gitlab-runner and executors for it -- so that heavy pipeline jobs wouldn't bog down our whole server. That brings up the question of do we still support shell logins into the base OS (as we do now) for users as well as administrators? And do we still enable the "shell" executor for gitlab-runner, if everything is supposed to be dockerized and we're trying to avoid running things on the bare base OS?
2. Maybe for a dedicated gitlab host as well, because that program is so freaking heavy.
3. And we might want hosts of different architectures, even Mac & Windows.
On that topic, we've had an offer of a donation of an Intel nuc to use as a permanent host (specs unknown). I also know of at least one Mac Mini M1 which could be donated as a build host. The idea of collecting hardware sounds nice - but is there a viable way to co-locate, provision network resources, and physically care for such hardware which may come into the Foundation's possession?
Thanks again,
Dave