Hosting MyPaint's Infrastructure

Developer's Area
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1

This topic expands on this comment from one of the GitHub repositories.

The Problem

Using services provided by third parties may dramatically increase the cost of running the MyPaint project’s infrastructure. Such services may include password managers, email, and forum hosting.

Proposal

Let’s rent a dedicated server and use a containerised workflow to host various services.

Challenges

  1. Identifying relevant services to host
  2. Selecting appropriate server hardware for the potential server load
  3. Configuring the services
  4. Maintenance
  5. Observing server load

1. Services

These are just examples of what could potentially be used:

Pinging @odysseywestra

2

I think I will probably use Linode to host some of these in the short term, but yes, it would be nice to get a server built and hosted somewhere. For example, I have access to colocation for my work and probably can get up to 10gbps on the network side. My work is also going through a bunch of hardware a client of ours abandoned so If I can scrounge enough, I could get a server put together for testing. Mind you the hardware might be too old for production use, but for testing or homelab is good enough.

I’m more partial to proxmox, but that’s cause I’m more comfortable working with VMs instead of containers. Though I’ve heard proxmox can maintain containers as well.

For docker, I’ve heard good things about https://casaos.io since it is meant to be an alternative to Synology’s DSM OS. If I were to move on to something else I would want to keep the management interface simple to work with so it is not a chore to maintain it.

If not, I do have experience using Webmin/Virtualmin for work, and that interfaces with the Linux OS directly, and you can extend it to work with docker and podman too.

I don’t know if I would want to maintain a mail server, but I’m open to experimenting with it even if it’s going to be just for Discourse and email forwarding.

Also, keep in mind the Discorse server is hosted and paid for by a third party called Altispeed Technologies. As far as I’m aware it’s hosted on a Digital Ocean Instance and is running Debian with Docker on top.

3

I’m going to leave pretty much all of the administration for what this could be up to you. Thanks for putting the time in.

I would like to point out that one of the main advantages of docker/podman is the vast range of pre-configured containers for services, which are more or less plug-and-play and update very smoothly. Long-term, I think this would create less work for you.

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I’m going to start with getting a $5/month linode VPS and get Vaultwarden up and running. I’ll use the Gmail account that was created a while back to create the master account and see if we an use organization to create sub accounts for the Core Team and Development team. The core team will have full admin access to the so that we have redundancy in case someone falls off the map. Development and Community Team will have read-access and passwords will remain locked, and will only have access to select websites that pertain to their responsibilities.

I think starting will be a good start and I will also look into hosting a CMS as well on the same server or a separate $5 VPS. I’ll look into email once we have the .org domain.

As far as coving costs, I will use Privacy to generate a CC for me to protect my info and issue reimbursements from the opencollective account.

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