Infrastructure Independence!

Haskell Foundation
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Better Equipped Infrastructure

We’re hosting a fundraiser! For the next four weeks, any donations made via Infrastructure Independence | Haskell.org, Inc (Powered by Donorbox), will be used solely for Haskell infrastructure and no other HF related initiatives.

Historically, the Haskell community has relied on a mix of cloud providers and self-hosted servers for our core infrastructure (Hackage, Stackage, GHC, CI, etc.). More recently the Haskell Infrastructure team has completed a migration of many of its web services away from Equinix Metal, so a mix of variety of hosting solutions, you can read more details about that here: Haskell Infrastructure Migration Update

ARM CI

ARM CI has always been a bit trickier to organize, mostly due to the relative dearth of options for ARM infrastructure. Microsoft’s Azure platform has provided us with a generous number of credits as part of their Open Source program. Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided to phase out this offering to open source communities, requiring us to seek alternative solutions for ARM CI.

As with the other infrastructure migrations, we have choices about how to proceed. The current ‘first choice’ for the infrastructure team is to purchase our own ARM server (an AmpereOne A128-34X) and host it at the co-location facility with many of our other web services.

A new tool in the toolbox?

Historically the Haskell Foundation has not done ‘calls for donations’ in this way. At ZuriHac I’ve been asked why we don’t do community fundraising beyond the passive donations accepted on our website, so when the need for an ARM server arose, we decided to try this model and see how it goes! Let us know your thoughts, should we do more of this? Keep it to specific areas (like a yearly infrastructure fundraiser)? Your donations are valuable, but so are your thoughts!

If any funds are raised beyond the cost of the ARM server, we will use those funds to purchase storage for backups and redundancy for our self-hosted services.

If you have hardware that you’re willing to provide via donation, we would very much be interested in that as well! Please reach out to me at jmct@haskell.foundation so we can discuss.

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Would the Foundation accept a donation of actual kit, if somebody reading this had a spare ARM server that met the Foundation’s desired specification?

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We would absolutely consider that!

Any such person should contact me at jmct@haskell.foundation!

I’ll edit the post to say as much.

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Well, this has gone very well!

I’m so happy to see the community being willing to support this effort, the infrastructure team and the GHC devs are going to be very pleased!

Since the ‘goal’ was met, we had some discussion about raising the goal amount. Unfortunately there’s no way to put a ‘stretch goal’ on the donorbox page, so I’ll just announce it here: if we could get the $8k that would enable us to further buttress our backup strategies with additional (and geographically distributed) hardware.

Thank you to those that have already donated! If you were on the fence, additional funds are still useful!

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