Intro
Over the years, sessions on shared infrastructure have kept on resurfacing at CoTech gatherings, e.g. autumn 2017, autumn 2018 and spring 2021.
Most recently, at the gathering in September this year, a session on shared infrastructure focused on exploring potential use cases for an emerging project within CoTech - Servers.coop. The idea is to easily spin VMs, clusters and apps.
Hardware
As some of you might have seen, earlier this year 14 compute and 2 storage blades were offered to the initiative and the plan is to plug them in the data centre in Ashton run by Cooperative Network Infrastructure. The plan is to set the servers up in the near future - to be carried out by @Liam from MediaBlaze Hosts.
Software
Servers.coop have been testing capsul-flask developed by Cyberia Computer Club based in Minnesota, US. The software is currently in alpha, suitable only for development use.
Needs in the network
After the gathering we circulated a survey about current use of servers at CoTech co-ops. We received 13 responses over two weeks. Will leave investigating the results to those interested, just a few quick highlights:
- 54% of respondents use mainly IaaS, 31% SaaS and 15% PaaS. Within that there is a richness of services and approaches to running them.
- Co-ops spend annually from Ā£0 to Ā£20k on their server infrastructure.
- Most respondents run their servers on a permanent basis and do talk internally about the servers (and providers) they use.
- Challenges to using independent infrastructure are recognised, e.g. reliability, uptime, ease of use, price, security, flexibility, maintenance overheads, migration compatibility.
- 38% would like to get involved with Servers.coop as users, 31% would like to get involved in development, 8% in design.
Discussion
It would great to hear everyoneās thoughts about the topic of shared infrastructure and Servers.coop in particular. Curious to understand the needs of Servers.coop in order to make their service operational and potentially useful to co-ops at CoTech. Is there a roadmap? Is there something we can do as the network to support your effort? Would appreciate discussing not only the hardware/software side but also the business prospects!
@shaun @chris @decentral1se @3wordchant @graham @liam and others involved, please feel most invited to edit this post to mitigate potential mistakes Iāve made.
Disclaimer: Animorph is not officially involved in Servers.coop, but we are interested in using the service, for now in development/testing capacity.