[ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Taylor Blau]

As some of you know, we have a website at https://git-scm.com, which has
served as the Git project's de-facto homepage.

That site is hosted on Heroku, which has graciously provided the Git
project with hosting credits for many years. That, combined with support
from Cloudflare has meant that the maintenance cost for the site is
effectively $0.

Unfortunately, Heroku no longer provides free hosting credits to
organizations and open-source projects. I have been in an ongoing
support thread with them, and their stance is pretty clear.

To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
the future:

  - Convert the Rails application into a static site that could be
    hosted elsewhere for free. The non-static portions of the site would
    have to become static in one way or another, and we'd have to come
    up with an alternative search mechanism to replace the existing one.

  - Explore ways to cheapen our Heroku bill (more on this later). Our
    footprint at Heroku currently is a dyno for the Rails site itself,
    along with a separate database (Postgres) and cache (Redis). We
    could explore eliminating the Rails-layer cache, and tune our
    Cloudflare settings to more aggressively cache parts of the website.

  - Pay Heroku using the Git project's funds held at Conservancy.

  - Find a cheaper Rails host.

Our Heroku bill varies slightly based on usage, but here's last month's
bill, which is more or less representative:

              | Usage (months)       | Cost $/mo |  Total
    ----------+----------------------+-----------+---------
    scheduler | 0.004941199999999998 | $25.00/mo |   $0.12
    web       | 1                    | $50.00/mo |  $50.00
    redis     | 1                    | $30.00/mo |  $30.00
    postgres  | 1                    | $50.00/mo |  $50.00
    ----------+----------------------+-----------+---------
                                                   $131.58

(I'm omitting about $1.46 of charges that come from spinning up dynos to
power "PR previews" when somebody makes a pull request to the
git/git-scm.com repository on GitHub).

I think we could reasonably get rid of the Rails-layer caching using
Redis and save some money there, but it may not be possible depending on
how much content Cloudflare is willing to keep warm in its cache.

In the meantime, Heroku is billing Git's account at Conservancy [1] in
order to keep the site running while we all figure out what to do next.
I have some opinions about what a sustainable solution looks like, but
I'll avoid sharing them just yet in order to avoid tainting the
discussion.

Thanks,
Taylor

[1]: I promised[2] an update on our financials, and am still working on
it. The Git project currently has about ~$70k USD in its account.
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/Yg%2FsO63nhhtAXWvn@nand.local/

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Taylor Blau]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2022 at 12:22:14PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
> the future:

Dan Moore (cc'd) has graciously offered the support of his company
FusionAuth [1] to help assist with our hosting costs. From Dan:

    [M]y company has benefited tremendously from git and would be happy
    to foot the monthly cost if you are looking for sponsors.

External support would go a long way towards keeping our existing funds
available for things like sponsoring travel and lodging for Git Merge
attendees who could not otherwise make it in person.

Dan: thank you very much for your gracious offer. Does anybody have
objections to having some external support? I think the only change to
the site would be adding an entry to the "Sponsors" section of the about
page [2].

Thanks,
Taylor

[1]: https://fusionauth.io/
[2]: https://git-scm.com/site

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Dan Moore]

Hi Taylor,

Yes, we would love to offer our monetary support if it makes sense for
the community.

Cheers,
Dan


On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 5:23 PM Dan Moore <dan@fusionauth.io> wrote:
>
> Hi Taylor,
>
> Yes, we would love to offer our monetary support if it makes sense for the community.
>
> Cheers,
> Dan
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 5:09 PM Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 01, 2022 at 12:22:14PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
>> > To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
>> > the future:
>>
>> Dan Moore (cc'd) has graciously offered the support of his company
>> FusionAuth [1] to help assist with our hosting costs. From Dan:
>>
>>     [M]y company has benefited tremendously from git and would be happy
>>     to foot the monthly cost if you are looking for sponsors.
>>
>> External support would go a long way towards keeping our existing funds
>> available for things like sponsoring travel and lodging for Git Merge
>> attendees who could not otherwise make it in person.
>>
>> Dan: thank you very much for your gracious offer. Does anybody have
>> objections to having some external support? I think the only change to
>> the site would be adding an entry to the "Sponsors" section of the about
>> page [2].
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Taylor
>>
>> [1]: https://fusionauth.io/
>> [2]: https://git-scm.com/site
>
>
>
> --
> Dan Moore  Head of Developer Relations
> 1630 Welton St suite 600-a, Denver, CO
> p: 720.560.8545
> w: fusionauth.io
> e: dan@fusionauth.io
>


-- 
Dan Moore  Head of Developer Relations
1630 Welton St suite 600-a, Denver, CO
p: 720.560.8545
w: fusionauth.io
e: dan@fusionauth.io

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Kaartic Sivaraam]

On 5 April 2022 4:39:08 am IST, Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> wrote:
>
>Dan: thank you very much for your gracious offer. Does anybody have
>objections to having some external support? I think the only change to
>the site would be adding an entry to the "Sponsors" section of the about
>page [2].
>

If that's all the change that's required, I would be in favour.

Thank you for offering to sponsor the git-scm site, Dan!

-- 
Sivaraam

Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Phillip Wood]

Hi Taylor and Dan

On 05/04/2022 00:09, Taylor Blau wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 01, 2022 at 12:22:14PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
>> To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
>> the future:
> 
> Dan Moore (cc'd) has graciously offered the support of his company
> FusionAuth [1] to help assist with our hosting costs. From Dan:
> 
>      [M]y company has benefited tremendously from git and would be happy
>      to foot the monthly cost if you are looking for sponsors.
> 
> External support would go a long way towards keeping our existing funds
> available for things like sponsoring travel and lodging for Git Merge
> attendees who could not otherwise make it in person.
> 
> Dan: thank you very much for your gracious offer. Does anybody have
> objections to having some external support? I think the only change to
> the site would be adding an entry to the "Sponsors" section of the about
> page [2].

That sounds like a good solution. Thank you Dan for your generous offer 
of support and thank you Taylor for looking after the website.

Best Wishes

Phillip

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Taylor,

On Fri, 1 Apr 2022, Taylor Blau wrote:

> As some of you know, we have a website at https://git-scm.com, which has
> served as the Git project's de-facto homepage.
>
> That site is hosted on Heroku, which has graciously provided the Git
> project with hosting credits for many years. That, combined with support
> from Cloudflare has meant that the maintenance cost for the site is
> effectively $0.
>
> Unfortunately, Heroku no longer provides free hosting credits to
> organizations and open-source projects. I have been in an ongoing
> support thread with them, and their stance is pretty clear.

Thank you for all your efforts. I frequently point users to git-scm.com,
be it for the manual pages or for other resources, and appreciate that you
keep it running so smoothly. While it is understandable that the free tier
is going away, it is nevertheless an unplanned work for us, and I thank
you for doing it.

> To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
> the future:
>
>   - Convert the Rails application into a static site that could be
>     hosted elsewhere for free. The non-static portions of the site would
>     have to become static in one way or another, and we'd have to come
>     up with an alternative search mechanism to replace the existing one.

This is my preference (and I would love to contribute the time, but am
quite short on that resource to help much).

It looks to me as if the only blocker is the site-search, and there are
ways to pre-generate an index e.g. in a Jekyll site (which we could host
on GitHub Pages, incidentally, which would be a very nice setup indeed).

The other thing the Rails app does is to regularly poll for updated
versions, e.g. Git for Windows and Git for Mac. This strikes me as
something that would benefit from the transparency provided by having a
GitHub workflow to perform said polling instead of the opaque Rails app on
Heroku with no public log of when it ran and whether it was successful.

Please let me know what you think, and whether you already looked into how
automatable/parallelizable this conversion would be. Hopefully I _can_ be
of use in bringing that about.

Thanks,
Dscho

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Christian Couder]

On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 12:39 AM Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 1 Apr 2022, Taylor Blau wrote:

> > To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
> > the future:
> >
> >   - Convert the Rails application into a static site that could be
> >     hosted elsewhere for free. The non-static portions of the site would
> >     have to become static in one way or another, and we'd have to come
> >     up with an alternative search mechanism to replace the existing one.
>
> This is my preference (and I would love to contribute the time, but am
> quite short on that resource to help much).

I wonder if this could be an Outreachy (maybe next Winter) or a GSoC
(2023) project.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Junio C Hamano]

Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 12:39 AM Johannes Schindelin
> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 1 Apr 2022, Taylor Blau wrote:
>
>> > To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
>> > the future:
>> >
>> >   - Convert the Rails application into a static site that could be
>> >     hosted elsewhere for free. The non-static portions of the site would
>> >     have to become static in one way or another, and we'd have to come
>> >     up with an alternative search mechanism to replace the existing one.
>>
>> This is my preference (and I would love to contribute the time, but am
>> quite short on that resource to help much).
>
> I wonder if this could be an Outreachy (maybe next Winter) or a GSoC
> (2023) project.

Good suggestion.

It would take talent quite different from what our past GSoC
programs saw, from both mentors and "contributors" (we used to call
them "students").  If we have mentors who can give good experience
to mentees, I would welcome to see such a task for a change.

Thanks.

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Taylor Blau]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2022 at 11:54:18PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > To that end, we have a few options about what to do with the website in
> > the future:
> >
> >   - Convert the Rails application into a static site that could be
> >     hosted elsewhere for free. The non-static portions of the site would
> >     have to become static in one way or another, and we'd have to come
> >     up with an alternative search mechanism to replace the existing one.
>
> This is my preference (and I would love to contribute the time, but am
> quite short on that resource to help much).
>
> It looks to me as if the only blocker is the site-search, and there are
> ways to pre-generate an index e.g. in a Jekyll site (which we could host
> on GitHub Pages, incidentally, which would be a very nice setup indeed).

There are a few other smaller-ish things that we are using Rails for.
But most of them are limited to "fetch this list of things from Postgres
and format it in HTML" which could easily be automated and checked into
the static version of git-scm.com's repo.

> The other thing the Rails app does is to regularly poll for updated
> versions, e.g. Git for Windows and Git for Mac. This strikes me as
> something that would benefit from the transparency provided by having a
> GitHub workflow to perform said polling instead of the opaque Rails app on
> Heroku with no public log of when it ran and whether it was successful.

Yeah, agreed. Another "behind the scenes" task is running:

    heroku run -a git-scm rake preindex
    heroku run -a git-scm rake downloads
    heroku run -a git-scm rake search_index

, which I do after Junio pushes new tags. (FWIW, these jobs should run
on a timer, too, but I like to update the site with new links around the
time a release is tagged as opposed to having to wait for the automated
job to kick off).

I imagine that this would be replaced with some kind of GitHub workflow,
and the result (any new pages, updated search indexes, etc.) would be
committed into the repository transparently. That workflow could be
automated as well and get kicked off when new tags are pushed to git/git
(I think).

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Taylor Blau]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2022 at 11:12:37AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> > I wonder if this could be an Outreachy (maybe next Winter) or a GSoC
> > (2023) project.
>
> Good suggestion.

I agree!

> It would take talent quite different from what our past GSoC
> programs saw, from both mentors and "contributors" (we used to call
> them "students").  If we have mentors who can give good experience
> to mentees, I would welcome to see such a task for a change.

I would be happy to help mentor a new contributor as somebody vaguely
familiar with the architecture of the existing site, though I have next
to no experience / good judgement on current web best practices ;).

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Taylor Blau]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 07:09:08PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> Dan: thank you very much for your gracious offer. Does anybody have
> objections to having some external support? I think the only change to
> the site would be adding an entry to the "Sponsors" section of the about
> page [2].

It's been a ~week since I sent this. In the meantime, a couple of folks
have responded that they would be happy to take Dan up on his offer to
support our monthly Heroku costs.

Any last objections? If I don't hear anything soon-ish, I'll work with
Dan and Conservancy to set up the logistics and transition our Heroku
billing off of our project funds.

> [2]: https://git-scm.com/site

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: [ANNOUNCE] git-scm.com Heroku credits update

[Taylor Blau]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 11:21:20AM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> Any last objections? If I don't hear anything soon-ish, I'll work with
> Dan and Conservancy to set up the logistics and transition our Heroku
> billing off of our project funds.

I didn't hear any objections in the meantime, so I'll work with Dan and
the fine folks at Conservancy offline to set up the remaining logistics.

Dan: thank you (again!) very much for your generous offer.

Thanks,
Taylor