Requirements for us using externally hosted services

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2011-02-03 at 16:03 -0500, Ricky Zhou wrote:
> At today's meeting, we started a discussion of what kind of requirements
> we should have for moving some services to externally hosted versions
> (like Transifex to tx.net or Wordpress blogs to wordpress.com).
> 
> Here's are some initial items that we came up with at the meeting.
> While it's often still useful to consider these on a case-by-case basis,
> let's get a good list of requirements to talk about when looking at
> hosted services.
> 
> 1) Some level of freeness (unclear where we draw the line)

Agreed - is a freesoftware API/bindings enough? For example ec2 using
python-boto?


> 2) Configuration management

for some services this is important for maintainability -for others,
like blogs, less so.


> 3) Backups
> 4) Ability to get data out

3 and 4 are coupled in my mind.

> 5) authn/authz
 - this is a fun an painful discussion about how we federate apps.

> 6) Level of support (for managed hosting like wordpress/tx)

   This should be broken out into: Level of support offered by service
and Level of support we're currently able to successfully offer.

B/c there is 'desired' supoort level and 'reality' and those two do not
necessarily align.

> 7) Cost (compared to our own maintenance costs)

indeed

-sv