gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Matt,

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 at 23:45, Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> We're paying 75K USD for the bandwidth to transfer data from the
> GitLab cloud instance. i.e., for viewing the https site, for
> cloning/updating git repos, and for downloading CI artifacts/images to
> the testing machines (AFAIU).

I believe that in January, we had $2082 of network cost (almost
entirely egress; ingress is basically free) and $1750 of cloud-storage
cost (almost all of which was download). That's based on 16TB of
cloud-storage (CI artifacts, container images, file uploads, Git LFS)
egress and 17.9TB of other egress (the web service itself, repo
activity). Projecting that out gives us roughly $45k of network
activity alone, so it looks like this figure is based on a projected
increase of ~50%.

The actual compute capacity is closer to $1150/month.

> I was not aware that we were being charged for anything wrt GitLab
> hosting yet (and neither was anyone on my team at Intel that I've
> asked). This... kind of needs to be communicated.
>
> A consistent concern put forth when we were discussing switching to
> GitLab and building CI was... how do we pay for it. It felt like that
> concern was always handwaved away. I heard many times that if we
> needed more runners that we could just ask Google to spin up a few
> more. If we needed testing machines they'd be donated. No one
> mentioned that all the while we were paying for bandwidth... Perhaps
> people building the CI would make different decisions about its
> structure if they knew it was going to wipe out the bank account.

The original answer is that GitLab themselves offered to sponsor
enough credit on Google Cloud to get us started. They used GCP
themselves so they could assist us (me) in getting bootstrapped, which
was invaluable. After that, Google's open-source program office
offered to sponsor us for $30k/year, which was I believe last April.
Since then the service usage has increased roughly by a factor of 10,
so our 12-month sponsorship is no longer enough to cover 12 months.

> What percentage of the bandwidth is consumed by transferring CI
> images, etc? Wouldn't 75K USD would be enough to buy all the testing
> machines we need and host them within Google or wherever so we don't
> need to pay for huge amounts of bandwidth?

Unless the Google Cloud Platform starts offering DragonBoards, it
wouldn't reduce our bandwidth usage as the corporate network is
treated separately for egress.

Cheers,
Daniel