A few years ago, I noticed that things were changing in the Eclipse Foundation's (EF) IT operations: we were adding servers, and lots of them.
Trays of 3U mega-machines, packing 14 compute units each, with on-board switches, immense fans and drawing much electrical power, providing our community with CPU cycles galore. Storage devices could not keep up, so in came the clustered mega-storage solution, nine massive machines with drives and drives and drives, coupled with expensive switching gear to link everything together.
And yet, it's still not enough. And it's unsustainable.
You may have heard a new buzzword that's been making inroads into the IT and Developer mainstreams: sustainability. There are a few articles floating about that mention it. The Eclipse Foundation is not immune to the unsustainable practice of unlimited consumption, and at the IT Desk, we're pivoting. We have to.
It's all about fairness. Responsible usage is a shared task to be supported by all, not just a few. In the following months, the engineers in the EF IT team will work towards measuring what matters and drawing baselines for reasonable consumption. Our systems will then be adapted to inform you if those reasonable consumption limits have been reached.
What does this mean? Well, that build that has been running continuously in the background may come to a stop, with an invitation to resume it -- tomorrow. The 275MB of the same dependencies that are downloaded 5x each day may fail after the third time, inviting you to resume -- later. Those 40,000 files produced by each build may be acceptable -- once, but not continuously.
The EF is here to help. We'll strive to provide visibility ands predictability in our operations. We'll start in observer-mode first. We'll communicate and share our findings. We'll help you adapt to the new sustainable environment.
The burden of responsible usage belongs to all of us -- for a fair, open and sustainable future.
