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

[Romain d'Alverny]

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.