Infrastructure Proposal
This is an effort of the Infrastructure Working Group to produce a definitive baseline spec for what online services the OSGeo Foundation, and the Foundation's projects, really need in order to be able to do their thing will full visibility, legitimacy and interconnectedness.
Critical Services
Code versioning / repository
Candidate: Subversion. Constraints: need to be able to import full version history from other SVN/CVS instances
Mailing lists
Candidates:Mailman (preferred),Sympa Constraints:
- Needs searchable, index-friendly web archives
- RSS feeds out very desirable
- Web forum integration quite desirable
Bug Tracker
Candidates: Trac (preferred), RT (undesired), Bugzilla
LDAP
Candidates: OpenLDAP
Centralise user management details. Used to store rights and permissions to distributed OSGeo systems, ideally also to SVN and bug tracker.
DNS
Ideally with management UI so it's easy for nominated OSGeo people to create new subdomains when/if needed.
Web Publishing System
Candidates: Drupal/Civicspace (current prototype), Plone/OpenPlans (possible future more application like goals)
Needed for the foundation website at minimum.
Nice to be able to offer to projects which are unhappy with the solution they currently have (GRASS,MapGuide in particular) but not obligatory for all to use.
- See Drupal Portal for current CMS thinking for the main web site.
- Web Migration Map covers not only web publishing but also web front-ends for other kinds of services and how persistence and ease of movement is going to happen.
Other less project critical but still desirable services
Wiki
Build/test farm
Software stack demo site
See Software Stack for rough old notes on how this could be. Space at this for telascience - many components necessary for a shiny Geodata Repository
Geodata Repository
See Geodata Repository for outline - hosted at telascience
Please add more if you think of them... i'm sure i've forgotten some stuff
Community Tools
General suite of tools that would put OSGeo on top, adding value to membership and engaging members
- Survey/polling & voting tools
- User profiles
- Code snippit/example repository
- Project management app for planning release cycles and events
IRC Support
- Logger for the #osgeo channel
- (mpg wishlist: meetingbot service, RSS feeds of IRC logs, ...)
Hosting
This is a strong recommendation that we consider hosting core/critical OSGeo services at the OSU Open Source Lab, a not-for-profit independent organisation within Oregon State University that runs infrastructure support and hosting for a wide range of open source organisations including the Apache, Mozilla and Eclipse foundations.
OSU offer 2 choices of service
- Unmanaged - the client supplies a box which goes in their rack and is responsible for admin maintenance and security
- Part-managed - the client either supplies a box or they purchase one, they manage the operating system and provide setup assistance and support-on-demand.
A part-managed solution would be ideal for OSGeo to host the "critical services" from the list above.
Costs
- 3-5K for purchase of server - with redundant PSUs, redundant disks etc.
- It costs OSL 75K p/a to support a full-time person. OSGeo would not need fulltime support - our demands are just not that high. The Board has speculatively budgeted 50K for online infrastructure needs
- It would be possible for us to hire a person directly from OSL's recommendation to work 'for OSGeo' at OSL, if this made sense.
How OSL self-supports
- They are a not-for-profit
- They get sponsorship from companies keen to promote more robust infrastructure for OS projects and are seeking more - currently they are receiving maintenance sums from Google and MySQL
Corey Shields is willing and able to answer any further OSL related questions - cshields AT osuosl DOT org