Haskell Infrastructure Migration Update

Equinix

Historically, Haskell infrastructure has had one primary host: Equinix Metal.[1] As the name implies, this was a bare-metal product which provided the infrastructure team with a lot of flexibility in managing Haskell’s services.

Equinix provided upwards of $100k per year in infrastructure hosting support to Haskell and also provided resources to several other OSS communities. This is a big deal, we thank Equinix for provided the OSS community with such a valuable service.

Near the end of 2024 Equinix announced that they would be sun-setting the Metal product and that all users would need to migrate to a new platform (i.e. even if we stayed with Equinix, we would have to migrate to a different product).

Migration Prep

This announcement was a significant forcing function for the infrastructure team. Even before the announcement, the infrastructure team had identified the concentration risk in having so many of our services hosted on one platform. Equinix sun-setting the Metal product was the realization of that concentration risk. Therefore we decided that part of the migration plan would include diversifying our hosting landscape.

The team worked together to identifying all current services and suitable new homes for those services. Cost was a large factor as well, a direct equivalent to the Equinix Metal product is not cheap and much of the flexibility provided by such products are not required by the Haskell community.[2] For this reason we explored a variety of options; co-location, other bare-metal products, VMs, etc.

Migration Result

As of yesterday, May 1st, the previous Equinix Metal instances that the Haskell community used have all been shut down! Our services are now hosted on a variety of platforms: DigitalOcean, SimSpace, Discourse (this Discourse instance, of course), and the OpenCape co-location facility in Cape Cod.

This has helped reduce some of the concentration risk, while being cost-effective. Having to manage some of the physical servers ourselves (the ones at OpenCape) is new for us, and we do not take it lightly. Because of this, we’ve chosen a co-location facility that is within 1 day’s drive of 3 of us.

Each migration had its share of small hiccups, some of which we are still ironing out, but overall I am very pleased with the work accomplished by our wonderful infrastructure team. The impact to the wider community has been minimal and we’re now planning for some additional infrastructure improvements and audits.

None of this would have been possible without this team’s effort and coordination. There are many moving parts to Haskell’s infrastructure and no one person is in control of all of them. It was no small task!

Please thank @sclv, @davean, @bgamari, and @chreekat!

Future

The Haskell Foundation was able to take on the responsibility of coordinating and managing these projects because our sponsors fund our work. Infrastructure is a never ending responsibility, and our sponsors ensure that we can continue to coordinate and enable our infrastructure volunteers to do what’s necessary to keep Haskell up and running!

While we worked hard to keep costs low, our costs are now higher, and our sponsors ensure that we have the funds necessary to ‘keep the lights on’.


  1. Originally the relationship was with the company Packet, which was acquired by Equinix in 2020. ↩︎

  2. Our traffic does fluctuate but unlikely an early-stage startup, but our growth requirements are steady and gradual. We don’t need to suddenly double our compute capability, for instance. ↩︎

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Many thanks! to the members of the infrastructure team. I’ve been able to follow this project from @jmct’s fortnightly reports to the Haskell Foundation’s board and, from that, have an appreciation of the complexity of the task.

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Quick follow on:

If you or the organization that you work for have any servers that you are looking to offload, please let us know. I’ll make a wider announcement about this in the future, but now that we have co-location space we can use donated hardware to improve our infrastructure.

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The work of the infra team is mission-critical, yet often unsung, work on behalf of the whole community. Thanks so much to everyone involved! It would be great if we can publicise more of your work in future, so everyone understands how important it is and who is contributing.

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I’m not sure if this can be disclosed, but what exactly is SimSpace hosting?