[mwcampbell]

Thanks for being so transparent about your operations.

Maybe this is somewhere in the manual and I missed it, but do you have some way of automating the configuration of your hosts and VMs? For example, do you use something like Ansible?

[ddevault]

No, I provision them manually. Being based on Alpine Linux makes this less time-consuming and more deterministic. At some point I might invest in something completely automated, but right now the manual approach is simpler - and if it's not broke, don't fix it.

[mwcampbell]

Ah, OK. Also, have you written anywhere about why you chose to use colocation rather than VPS (or "cloud") hosting, or leased dedicated hosting for the CI system? If you could use someone else's hardware rather than having to select, buy, and set up your own, then at least in theory, you could spend more time on other things. But I'm sure you have your reasons for making the choice that you did. I'm just curious about what those reasons are, if you're inclined to share.

[ddevault]

There are lots of reasons, but the most obvious one is cost. All of SourceHut's servers are purpose-built for a particular role, and their hardware is tuned to that. The server that git.sr.ht runs on is pretty beefy- it cost me $5.5K to build. I paid that once and now the server belongs to us forever. I ran the same specs through the AWS price estimator, and it would have cost ten grand per month.