[Mageia-sysadm] questions about our infrastructure setup & costs

Mon Apr 2 18:02:48 CEST 2012

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 16:59, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
+> Le lundi 02 avril 2012 à 15:23 +0200, Romain d'Alverny a écrit :
+> That's a rather odd question, since with your treasurer hat, you should
+> have all infos, so I do not really see what we can answer to that.
+
+If I ask, it's that I don't. *\o/*
+
+And it would greatly appreciated that sysadmin decipher these things
+for a more accessible understanding of the infrastructure, not only
+for me, but for other future people that may not have your technical
+background.
+
+> The list of servers is in puppet :
+> http://svnweb.mageia.org/adm/puppet/manifests/nodes/
+>
+> and each has some module assigned to it, take this as functional chunk.
+>
+> Unfortunately, the servers are all doing more than one tasks, so
+> splitting them in functional chunks do not mean much.
+
+Yes it does. That's exactly this other view that I'm asking for.
+Because it makes sense to know what the "buildsystem" chunk/unit
+costs, as a whole, in storage/bandwidth/hosting options, in comparison
+with the "user accounts" one, with the "Web sites" one, with the
+"mailing-lists" one, etc. so that we can consider different hosting
+options for each of them.
+
+It makes sense too to have a dependencies graph at some level to
+quickly explain/see how our infrastructure components work with each
+other.
+
+Because, these considerations need to be understood/thought out/taken
+also by people that are _not_ sysadmins, such as persons that may
+focus on organizing our financial resources or contacts or donations
+for that end.
+
+Think about this as "enabling other community members to grasp what it
+takes to make Mageia.org function and to contribute means to that
+end".
+
+For instance, if we can have functional chunks, we may decide:
+ - which ones are critical (and should be moved to a solution that has
+the greatest possible availability): for instance LDAP, identity,
+mailing-lists, www, blogs;
+ - which ones may more safely shutdown without shutting down other
+independent services from a functional point of view; (for instance,
+buildsystem could go down without injuring the code repository itself,
+or the mailing-lists; code repositories may shut down too, if a later,
+read-only copy is available somewhere else
+ - which ones may be redundant and how.
+
+Yes, of course, some systems already split up like this (www, blog,
+ldap are not in Marseille here). But apart from sysadmin, no one
+knows. No one knows either what are the plans.
+
+Splitting by function, dependency seems a good way to know what the
+system does, and how we can lay it out, not in one or two data
+centers, but more globally.
+
+Thanks for your figures, I'll start compiling bits, but that's just a start.
+