The hidden cost of multi-cloud, and how full open source reduces lock-in
The X. Org Foundation has successfully completed a migration from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to Packet, which it reckoned “should save us around $30 per day.” The X. Org Foundation manages a number of key open-source projects including the Wayland graphics protocol, the X. Org server, and the Mesa 3D graphics library. The migration was mentioned in the X. Org board minutes last week. The brief note has brought closure to a problem that at one time threatened to disrupt the developers’ work. In January 2020, the monthly bill from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was over $6,000, and the following month board member Daniel Vetter sent out an email explaining that if the costs were not reduced, CI (Continuous Integration) services would have to be cut “somewhere between May and June this year.” “That would have been a pretty bad drawback for all the projects there,” Benjamin Tissoires, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, told us. His company allowed him the time to investigate. The story began back in 2018, when freedesktop.org migrated from a homegrown project hosting infrastructure to one based on the community edition of GitLab, a source control and DevOps system, hosted on GCP. “We politely declined the offer of a license to the pay-for GitLab Enterprise Edition; we wanted to be fully in control of our infrastructure, and on a level playing field with the rest of the open-source community,” said Collabora’s Daniel Stone from the freedesktop.org team. GitLab offered to sponsor the GCP hosting for an initial period and everything looked good. Initially the cloud costs were around $350 to $400 per month. The system was popular, new projects came on board, including Mesa, and there was more use of modern development practices like CI. By March 2019 the bill had risen to over $3,000. A $30,000 grant from Google removed the issue for around eight months, then at the end of 2019 when the grant was spent it was apparent that something was badly wrong.
