Resetting Expectations: Fedora Infrastructure.

[David Nalley]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 8:17 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-02-18 at 19:05 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 18:00:41 -0700,
>> >   3. talk.fedoraproject.org. The asterisk server gets about 8 phone
>> > calls a month. It is a very ancient version and it seems a continual
>> > effort to keep up with the upstream.
>>
>> Note that this one is useful for remote participation in FADs and FUDCON,
>> though is underutilized for that purpose. It's not just for person to person
>> calls between contributors.
>
> I think we can find another solution for those cases that doesn't
> involve having a machine/instance running 24/7.
>
> Or we can find a place willing to provide it for us for less than the
> maintenance cost of it.
>

+1 to the infra guys for taking what I imagine will be an unpopular
but very necessary position. There are things that are core and vital
to the 'business' of Fedora (like build services) and things that are
on periphery that others do far better than we do because that's their
niche; Transifex being a prime example. We have enough core things
that aren't close to perfect that we should focus our limited manpower
and expertise resources on those core items, and leverage 'our' money
resources for those areas that aren't core to us but that we still
need the service.
Providing any service ourselves places service expectations on it, and
maintenance burden. It doesn't make sense to do that for every
possible permutation of service.
This particular problem, (assuming that adding services and
applications adds no cost or no cost past the initial installation) is
a common one that plagues IT departments the world over.