No, it really isn’t.
I built and continue to operate[1] a buildfarm which is much larger than Hydra x86_64 (I crossbuild everything else) – it can mass-rebuild (i.e. staging) the full release packageset every 18 hours.
People massively overestimate the cost of running a buildfarm because they’ve been programmed to think that overpriced cloud nonsense is the only option.
The only thing that’s inherently expensive is the bandwidth donated by fastly. Nixworld needs to break its bandwidth addiction. That requires deep architectural changes which would be painful, but extremely beneficial in the long run. Unfortunately the will to make those changes is certainly not present at this time.
scroll down to the images. That was only two-thirds of the cluster at the time; it is even larger now. ↩︎