[Twisted-Python] bad news about twistedmatrix.com's hosting

[Adi Roiban]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2021 at 08:42, Glyph <glyph at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:

> Hello Twistors,
>
> Our venerable hosting provider, tummy.com, will be terminating their
> business operations on September 30, 2021.
>
> >>> datetime.date(2021, 9, 30) - datetime.date.today()
> datetime.timedelta(days=60)
>
>
> In addition to being a bit personally sad - Tummy has been an avid
> supporter of the Twisted community since the very beginning - this means we
> have just about 60 days to fully migrate our website, mailing list, and
> DNS's hosting from Dornkirk, the machine where it's been running
> continuously since 2013, to ... something else.
>
> There are 2 problems here:
>
>
>    1. We need a sponsor to help us find a new hosting or cloud provider
>    where things can be hosted.  We do pay tummy currently, and we can probably
>    ask the SFC to pay a different hosting provider a similar price for
>    equivalent services, but ideally we'd find someone willing to donate
>    something so as not to put a drain on those resources.
>
>    2. I will need significant help with the operational aspects of the
>    migration.  I typically do a bunch of behind-the-scenes system
>    administration for twistedmatrix.com to keep the whole thing clunking
>    along, but after my brain has been fried by a year and a half's worth of
>    pandemic stress, I simply don't have the time, energy, or mental capacity
>    to do this.  I know I've asked for help before and rarely received any, but
>    if I have to do *this* entirely by myself, the most likely outcome is
>    that I'll migrate DNS to some free cloud thing so at least my email address
>    doesn't break (I migrated SMTP, and thereby everything associated with
>    personal email addresses to Mailgun some years ago, so Tummy is not in that
>    loop for that), and the website (and this mailing list) will simply stop
>    working sometime between now and October.  So if you'd like to keep
>    www.twistedmatrix.com, speed.twistedmatrix.com, our IRC bot (which is
>    offline anyway right now due to Freenode shutting down),
>    https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/, this mailing list, or our
>    dogfooding instance for Twisted Names DNS, please volunteer so we can start
>    to coordinate.
>
>
> If you've been wanting to just use Github Issues and don't care about
> preserving any of the data in Trac, congratulations, you're about to win
> that argument by default ;-).
>
> In the worst case scenario, I will download a backup image before things
> get turned off in case someone wants to deal with this
>
>
Hi Glyph

Thanks for sending the message.
This is bad, but I am confident that we can do the migration in 60 days, as
long as we don't expect to have the exact same Twisted infrastructure.

We have a monthly credit of 150 USD from MS to spend on Azure services.

A quick hack would be to create a new VM in Azure with Ubuntu 18.04 and
migrate the existing server to it.

Do we have other servers hosted with tummy.com, other than
dornkirk.twistedmatrix.com ?

I will not have too much time to do the migration, but I can ask a sysadmin
from my work to help with that and my company will cover that costs.

I think that for now, we should see who is interested with helping with the
migration and after 1 week start to work with that team.

Maybe we will need to schedule an online meeting, but I hope we can do
async work via GitHub Issues (braid) and IRC/Gitter.

I saw that you have already considered using containers for Twisted infra
https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/issues/265

In parallel with migrating  dornkirk.twistedmatrix.com, we can look at
outsourcing some of our services.
For example

* Move mailing list to the main Python mailing list server
* Move DNS to a cloud provider (Azure DNS)
* Move Trac Wiki to GitHub Wiki
* Move Trac Tickets to GitHub Issues
* Move static file hosting to GitHub pages
* Move highscore to a container and update it to pull info from GitHub hooks
* IRC bot to some sort of integration to Gitter and then IRC bridge
* Retire speed tests and buildbot

------

>From past experience, I would say that most active Twisted contributors are
software developers and not sysadmin.
So we don't have the resources to keep custom Twisted infrastructure.
And with the limited resources that we have, I would like to see Twisted
contributors work at doing code review, fixing bugs rather than doing
infrastructure work.

So I am +1 for outsourcing as many Twisted services as possible.

I think that we have already outsourced a few services:

* Automated testing to Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions
* Git Hosting to GitHub
* Some Twisted sub-projects use GitHub Issues
* Python package downloads to PyPi
* Documentation hosting to Read The Docs

PS: for quick text messages if you don't like IRC, we are experimenting
with Gitter at https://gitter.im/twisted/twisted

-- 
Adi Roiban
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