This post was contributed by Andrea Veri from the GNOME Foundation. GNOME has historically hosted its infrastructure on premises. That changed with an AWS Open Source Credits program sponsorship which has allowed our team of two SREs to migrate the majority of the workloads to the cloud and turn the existing OpenShift environment into a fully scalable and fault tolerant one thanks to the infrastructure provided by AWS. By moving to the cloud, we have dramatically reduced the maintenance...
Could you please explain further?
How does free infrastructure hosting from AWS hurt anyone? There’s no privacy concerns and this helps Gnome’s development.
The only way this will hurt is if Gnome is not prepared to switch away once their credits are up.
If you don’t understand why people don’t want to use something that associates with Amazon or Bezos willingly, I’m not sure how to explain it to you, to be quite frank.
I’m worried about vendor lock-in. Once GNOME has migrated everything to AWS, Amazon might start being a dumbfuck and abusing their “clients”, as they abuse a lot of other organizations as well.
I can’t think of any specific threats from this, but knowing Amazon, they put more effort into coming up with vile shit that i could even think of.
Gnome isn’t locked-in. For being an important open source project, AWS has given Gnome credits so that they can use AWS free of charge for years. Once those credits expire, they are free to leave. So long as they do their proper preparation to migrate away, they get multiple years of hosting for free.
Gnome has already been in this circumstance. Their free hosting from another provider expired so they moved. Though as I’m researching this, I can’t find the sources I’ve read this from.