Extended S3 Sponsorship!
I’m thrilled to share some great news that hope fuels the rest of the week positively. 
The AWS Open Source team has once again stepped up to support us by approving another 12-month sponsorship, and also approving the higher request I made. Starting this month, we will receive $15,000 worth of AWS credits per month, up from the previous $9,000 per month! To be direct, this substantial increase stems for continuous growth of our community and at the same time highlights our need to focus on building a more “Sustainable Nix”. This provides us with the resources needed to continue the various efforts we kicked off 12 months ago with the goal of building a more sustainable Nix through long term resolutions.
A Look Back: Our S3 Journey
Initial CTA in 2023
S3 Short Term Resolution 2023
As many of you know, our partnership with AWS began as a crucial step following the conclusion of LogicBlox’s sponsorship. Over the past year, AWS’s support has allowed us to maintain the stability of our infrastructure, ensuring that critical services like cache.nixos.org and releases.nixos.org continue to operate smoothly while the infrastructure team looks into longer term sustainability.
The process of extending the S3 sponsorship involved close collaboration with the AWS Open Source Strategy and Marketing team—special thanks to Mila for spearheading this on the AWS side. We applied formally through the Open Data Sponsorship Program, and conducted community wide research to uncover key value areas created by Nix in the AWS ecosystem (finding teams in and out of AWS utilizing Nix, Nix consumption through AWS, and more). This was a community wide effort, many thanks to everyone that took part!
The Numbers Behind the Need
To give you a sense of scale, our S3 storage and Fastly CDN are handling nearly a petabyte of data every week. AWS users alone have fetched over 34 petabytes of data from our CDN between June 2022 and July 2024, making them the largest consumer of our services. This increase in traffic reflects the rapid growth and adoption of Nix and NixOS, but it also means our infrastructure costs have grown substantially. And the downside, showing that it’s not a sustainable rate.
Our current S3 usage includes:
- Cache.nixos.org: 104.61 TiB of standard storage and 450.7 TiB in standard IA storage, spread across over 866 million objects.
- Releases.nixos.org: Hosts all NixOS ISO images and related files, seeing significant traffic every day.
The Impact of the Increased Sponsorship & Next Steps
With this new level of support from AWS, we have the breathing room needed to be more deliberate in our approach to long-term sustainability. Over the next year, our infra team will continue to explore and implement strategies to reduce costs, optimize our storage, and potentially diversify our infrastructure partnerships.
Some of the initiatives we’re focusing on include:
- Reducing costs: The current plan to reduce our S3 storage costs consists of two efforts. One is looking into the options of removing old releases from releases.nixos.org and then garbage-collect cache.nixos.org, i.e. remove store paths that are not part of a release on releases.nixos.org. The other is led by @edef and @fricklerhandwerk as part of the long term S3 resolution effort.
- Exploring New Partnerships: We’re actively exploring opportunities with other options out there to reduce reliance.
- Long-Term Sustainability: With this extended sponsorship, we have the time to plan and execute sustainable solutions without the immediate pressure of funding gaps.
As we move forward, we’ll continue to keep everyone updated on our progress and any new developments. If you’re interested in contributing to these efforts or have ideas to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Infra team or join the discussion in our community threads.
Thank you again to everyone who has been involved in these efforts, and a special shoutout to the folks at AWS, @lovesegfault, @fricklerhandwerk, @arianvp , Infra Team, @edef , @hexa, @tomberek, @edolstra for all of their support on this!
Please send over any links or resources I can add below.
Links to further discussions:
Links to prior resources: