KDE now has its own Matrix infrastructure

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 5:10 AM Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 2/21/19 8:46 PM, Filipe Saraiva wrote:
> > 2. What are the reasons to use a server owned by a company, not by us? I
> > don't want to start a flamewar, just know the reasons and motivations.
>
> Hosting a Matrix server currently requires a quite beefy box, and is
> also somewhat maintenance-intensive. I'll let the Sysadmin team speak
> for itself, but it's my understanding it's generally not opposed to
> making use of hosted services, if they're in principle self-hostable and
> free software. Going by the Sysadmin report at Akademy and the things
> currently in flight, especially at the current time I would imagine it's
> welcome not to increase the burden on our sysadmins.

We are extremely busy currently yes.

Over the past 6 weeks we have migrated a large number of sites and
services to newer machines with minimal downtime (and in many cases,
we did hot migrations so there was no user visible downtime). We still
have quite a some bits and pieces left to migrate from the older
machines which we're decommissioning, but most of it is completed at
this stage.

Once that's completed chances are our focus will switch to other areas
of the infrastructure that need work, so there isn't likely to be much
free people time for many months yet.
(and i've yet to make plans to deal with the final Ubuntu 14.04 system
- the above migrations eliminated two of the three ones we had left at
the start of this year)

>
> In addition to getting the infrastructure to run it on (some of "our"
> servers are donated too, mind you) this donation by Matrix also includes
> their support - it's basically a commercial hosting service we're
> currently getting for free. During the launch days, several Matrix staff
> were engaged in giving KDErs chat support and doing hotfixe on the setup.
>
> Of course part of the requirements for doing this was to make sure that
> sysadmin has access to pull full backups, so that if need be, we can
> move the service somewhere else in the future. In this sense it's quite
> similar to the agreement KDE e.V. has with Pling to run store.kde.org.
>
> We've also been impressed that Matrix have stayed true to their plans
> laid out some years ago, of setting up a foundation to turn ownership of
> the Matrix specs over to. This appears in the final stages. Plus, if you
> followed the developments in the Matrix world, one of the first things
> they did after working their way out of a funding crisis a year or two
> ago was to put work into those specs again. Those actions leave at least
> me with the necessary degree of trust in them to stay in tune with KDE's
> values. This is, after all, also part of what makes Matrix compelling
> for KDE in the first place, and working together seems mutually beneficial.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Eike

Thanks,
Ben