[Linux-aus] Annual General Meeting 2011 Minutes

[James Iseppi]

Hi All,

On 04/02/2011, at 6:20 PM, Steve Walsh wrote:
>>> James Iseppi wonders whether LA should make use of cloud and related infrastructure rather than owning physical hardware.
>>> 
>> What was the outcome of this suggestion?
>> 
> This was in relation to a number of issues that were apparently 
> experienced by the LCA2011 team with their LA provided VM. The admin 
> team was not aware of any issues with the VM that was supplied, so we're 
> taking this up with James to find out what actually happened.

That particular comment was unrelated to the LCA VM, and instead was about whether LA owning physical machines that provide VM's is really the best way of doing things.

Commercial providers of VM's are setup to handle a whole bunch of things that LA probably isn't:
* High availability (redundant disks, redundant servers, failover on hardware failure)
* Hardware refreshes and failures are included in the price
* 24/7 Support and Monitoring
* Multiple physical locations for servers (generally different capital cities, or even countries)
* The ability to move a VM from one physical location to another with minimal downtime.

There is also the option of systems like google's appengine if the application fits within it's requirements.

I'm not saying that LA shouldn't have it's own VM hosting infrastructure, but my question at the AGM was trying to understand whether these other options have been considered by the council. Some questions that I would ask if making the same decision are:
* What are the benefits of LA hosting VM's on it's own infrastructure?
* What are the issues of LA hosting VM's on it's own infrastructure?
* What are the costs of LA maintaining it's own infrastructure?
* What are the benefits of having someone else host VM's for us?
* What are the issues of having someone else host a VM for us?
* What are the costs of paying for VM's from a commercial provider?
* Based on the answers to the above question, which is the best option for LA?

Thanks
James