The costs involved are so small it makes me a bit sad. Such an important and useful project is struggling over costs that are less than an average engineer’s salary?
This is something that tens of thousands of engineers are getting huge value from in their daily life. I know this is a pretty common problem in the open source world, but it still sucks to see.
NixOS stores its build artifacts in S3, but it's now too expensive, so they're exploring other options, including Storj, Cloudflare R2, and self-hosting.
Would a decentralized storage option work to reduce some costs incurred by the centralized storage companies (ie, P2P via torrents)? Offload the bandwidth and storage to community members willing to loan out their unmetered home connections for hosting the nixOS packages? Even corps or startups can loan out their infra to assist on an as needed basis and use the depreciation as some sort of tax write off.
All the major clouds charge close to 9 cents per gigabyte for data out (egress).
Cloudflares R2 storage charges 0 cents out per gigabyte.
I don’t know how they do it.
> LogicBlox, the longstanding sponsor of https://cache.nixos.org 25, is ending its sponsorship
Wow, I suppose this was bound to happen eventually, but LogicBlox built their entire prod infra on NixOS a decade ago.
Guess they didn't see the value in continuing to use such a niche distro.
I'm surprised replit is not helping out financially considering they now use nix to power their repls.
The other option is to rent a computer with lots of storage from hetzner / ionos or similar.
I was tempted to jump in the initial post and offer help with self storage, but honestly as someone who has done large-scale self-hosted object storage (many PB of storage in fact), it's just one of those things that are almost always going to be better left to a dedicated service like S3/R2 or something else.
I'm glad to see their short and long-term plan will probably involve a subsidized professional block storage service. I think that's the right move.
Following securing the runway, I wonder if something like IPFS would add value here.
I wish Nixpkgs were available over peer-served networks, like bittorrent.
Since the output of nix is typically hashed it seems ripe for rsync based mirroring? Is there something particularly difficult for nixos over a typical arch Linux mirror for example?
Does anyone know what the following refers to?:
> ... and potential for replacing Fastly.
As far as i can tell from this and previous post - mix cache isn't using Fastly?
Lol AWS or Cloudlfare could cover these costs easily. Let’s see who steps up.
Tangentially, if they self hosted using say ZFS would the cached artifacts and other such things be candidates for the dedup features of the file system?
Interesting to compare with other distros: https://chaos.social/@Foxboron/110480984761804936
> It's wild to me that the monthly cost of the #NixOS cache infrastructure could fund the entire Arch Linux infrastructure costs for a year.
> It's 6 times the amount Arch get in monthly donations, and ~4 times Debian gets in monthly donations.