[SAC] QGIS servers

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

Hi List,

last year the QGIS virtual machine has been heavily used for:
- our issuetracking system (redmine)
- wiki (redmine)
- building documentation (sphinx)
- bulding website (sphinx based)
- building nightlies
etc etc
- our jenkins server is run by somebody else

Currently disk is full (this will be handled today, hopefully), but in 
general we suffered from limited resources on that server.
Eg, hanging redmine processes, made our site unavailable etc etc
(not talking about outages from last days, that is just the 2.0 downloads)

Ideally all this different beasts would be separate processes OR machines:
- one java one for jenkins et al.
- one ruby one for redmine et al
- one python one for sphinx (building/serving docs and sites 2 times a day)
- one dev one (for building/nightlies etc)

We have been investigating 'Dockers' to ease this separation, and make 
it easier for (future) QGIS devs to create a local development 
environment. Nice thing about docker (if I understand correctly), is 
that it runs beautifully on on a big server, and can be tweaked and 
configured from all sides.
I also investigated the costs of running a rented server (eg at hetzner: 
2x2Tb disk, 32 gb RAM, i7-8core etc for 49 euro).

Question to OSGeo SAC:
- what is the position/idea of OSGeo in this?

Should a (pretty demanding?) question like this being served by OSGeo 
server(s). Or should the OSGeo hardware be reserved for smaller/starting 
projects.

Or practical:

Can OSGeo provide us either
one big bare-metal machine, so we could try/do the Docker scenario 
(preferred option!!)
OR
provide us with enough virtual machines so we could partition different 
beasts better
OR
should we try to fund a hetzner server for QGIS (actually: "should OSGeo 
try compete with commercial services like Hetzner for this kind of 
questions").

Please let us know what you think so we can proceed our quest for world 
domination ;-)

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde
Infrastructure Manager QGIS Project Steering Committee


[0] https://www.docker.io/learn_more/