Samba CI mins now totalled: ~145,000 per month: Help needed

[Stefan Metzmacher]

Am 02.05.22 um 04:55 schrieb Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical:
> On Thu, 2022-03-17 at 09:17 +1300, Andrew Bartlett via samba-technical
> wrote:
>> Posted publicly to samba-technical as nothing here is really private,
>> and perhaps our broader community can step up and help.
>>
>> [feel free to follow up to the team list if you need to say something
>> private]
>>
>> Just saw that on the public runners we use 10million mins per month
>> per
>> GitLab's stats.  These stats have only just become available.
>>
>> That's a lot of mins.
>>
>> See attached and at
>> https://gitlab.com/groups/samba-team/-/usage_quotas#shared-runners-usage-quota-tab
> 
> Just an update, I've grabbed a new screenshot and it is now saying 147k
> per month, which is more reasonable.  The tooling here hasn't been
> great.
> 
>> It is hard to follow exactly what GitLab.com's plans are for moving
>> from what must be rather un-sustainable for them, but there are
>> clues:
>>
>> https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/243722#proposal makes
>> it
>> clear our free run will end soon.
>>
>> I'm sure we, as free users, bring value to their platform but that's
>> a
>> lot of CPU, even just environmentally!
>>
>> I think they plan to give public open source projects a 'cost factor'
>> of 0.008, and 50,000 mins free, so that would be billed at only an
>> extra $290 USD per month (((9.87 [million mins] x 1,000,000) * 0.008
>> [cost factor] - 50,000 [gold plan free limit]) / 1000 [mins per $10])
>> *
>> 10 [price for 1000 mins].
> 
> In the meantime that 'cost factor' has changed to only a 50% discount
> 
> The new math would be:  (((147,000 * 0.5 [cost factor]) - 50,000
> [ultimate plan free limit]) / 1000 [mins per $10]) * 10 [private for
> 1000 mins] = $235 per month.
> 
> This is on top of the $600 per month we currently pay Rackspace (the
> counted mins only count shared runners).
> 
> Thankfully running 147,000 mins at another provider need not be
> impossibly expensive, eg at Catalyst Cloud (just because I can find the
> price sheet quickly) it would be ~384 USD (assuming optimal use of 8GB
> 4CPU instances at exactly 1 hour blocks).  The real world will be more,
> but not an earth-shattering difference.
> 
> Thankfully this is also the kind of amount we can feasibly ask OSU OSL
> to host (I think) or even if we bought at Rackspace (more $$$) it
> wouldn't bankrupt us.

We could also rent a machine (or two) like our hrx0.samba.org
(which hosts our autobuilds) and let them run runners for us.
That would just be ~94 USD for each of them.
Or a version with 32 instead of 16 cores, for just ~125 USD.

And our autobuild runs much quicker than a pipeline, so it's likely
that one machine would be enough for our workload.

metze