Equinix Metal, CTA & Infra Short Update

[ron]

Short TL;DR (More information can be found in Mic92s post): Infrastructure Announcement: The future of OfBorg – Your Help Needed! - Announcements - NixOS Discourse

Equinix Metal has been providing in-kind sponsorship/funding to our needs for a while! Thank you to Edward Vielmetti and the entire team there. Equinix needs to roll back this funding going into next year and we are launching an effort to ensure continuity for the short term and sustainability for the longer term.

The board (aka me), @Ericson2314, @fpletz, @tomberek, @hexa, @Mic92, @winterqt and @infinisil recently met to discuss how to move forward with a replacement for the Equinix machines. In short:

1. Evaluation needs will be taken care of by GitHub Actions going forward. @infinisil and @Mic92 are tending to that, starting with Parallel GH actions workflow for Nixpkgs eval by infinisil · Pull Request #356023 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub, but will need some follow-ups.
2. To take care of builds in the short-term future, @hexa from the infra team will make a funding proposal to the foundation for renting necessary machines, similar to the draft in Infrastructure Announcement: The future of OfBorg – Your Help Needed! - #34 by Mic92.
3. For the long-term future, we are looking into sponsorships of hardware and a place to host it. The board and infra team will follow up on some potential previous offers from Flying Circus, Ampere, Wobcom, Obsidian Systems. Appreciation to all of these teams!

As such, there is no immediate critical concern at the moment and we will keep updating.

If you have connections to companies that might also be able to help us out with 3., please reach out to foundation@nixos.org or infra@nixos.org, thank you!

[hexa]

@ron

To take care of builds in the short-term future, @hexa from the infra team will make a funding proposal to the foundation for renting necessary machines

The proposal is up and ready for review. PTAL

Hydra short-term transition plan proposal