Hosting offer from Alter Way

[Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2012 at 07:24:27PM +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Alter Way (oVirt user and community member, French company) have
> generously offered to host some of our services as part of their
> efforts to support the project.
> 
> To give some background: The company is preparing a cloud offering
> based on oVirt nightlies running on Fedora. They are a hosting
> company (among other things) based in Paris, France.
> 
> We talked to them about our needs for Jenkins, and after getting
> reassurance on the bandwidth requirements for the Jenkins server,
> they have ade the following offer:
> 
> Alter Way will provide:
>  - For Jenkins,  2 Bi Quad servers (with Jenkins running on bare
> metal) with 8 or 16 GB of RAM each and 2 fast 146 GB disks each,
> with RAID 10 for the 4 disks
>  - For other services (Gerrit, Mailman, wiki, git): 1 or 2 VMs
> hosted on oVirt
> 
> In return, they would like:
>  - Recognition of the hosting in the page footer of the hosted services
>  - Recognition as a project sponsor on the project sponsors and
> supporters page
>  - The also offer to have their cloud service serve as a case study
> for the oVirt project

I think that's up to the board to decide so no opinion here.

> I did discuss with Stéphane Vincent, their representative, that we
> might want to host some services elsewhere - we have previously
> talked about hosting the website on OpenShift. I've asked him (and
> am waiting for clarification) on whether that might affect their
> offer.

I would like this cleared up. Suppose we get another hosting offer we
still want the freedom to move some services.

> In the meantime, I would like the opinions of the infra team - does
> this offer satisfy our needs and requirements for Jenkins? If that's
> the case, I would like to ask the board if they approve of the offer
> and the request to recognise Alter Way as a sponsor of the project?

I think that as long as it's better than our current EC2 we should do
it. Let's look at the factors:

- Price
Looks like an easy win here.

- Performance
Hard to say without testing, but it would be very unexpected if a
machine with the listed specs would perform less than EC2.

- Availability
Again hard to say without experience, but given they're a hosting
company it would suprise me.

All in all I'd welcome this offer.