Hosting providers post-Rackspace

Infrastructure
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I got bad news: I just got word from Brett Smith at SFC that Rackspace is ending the OSS discount program we are using for hosting 99% of our services except for EHR demos. Not quite happy about this considering I recently moved Rocket Chat there.

We need to explore other options. Let’s put our thinking caps on. This is time-sensitive and should happen sooner, rather than later. Ideally, I’d like us to use a service that I can create and destroy VMs at will using terraform and provision them using Ansible. Server creation must be automated in my book.

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I read that. I’m reaching out to my sources to see if that’s possible. I think we should approach Google as well.

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TechSoup is also an option. I have a friend of mine who owns a hosting company…but the key criteria I have is: can servers be created and destroyed in an automated fashion? That’s currently one of the gripes I have with Rackspace, it’s not easy to do that, at least using a unified tool like terraform.

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This is important, but not quite urgent yet in my book. But we should proceed at full speed.

We knew this day would come, so not too surprising to see it’s finally here.

More later.

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Can someone post the costs of what we have been using … I know it comes back to zero at the end of the day but would be pretty good to estimate how much we use

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We are working on getting the latest, from Rackspace via Conservancy.

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I got my hands on the expenses. We are paying $676.38. I see SFC got a special discount of $431.34 – without that we pay $1,107.72 This is all zeroed out as we are well below the $2,000 limit.

Here is a breakdown:

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It is worth noting that this is old…I’m going to try to get more current. I am also waiting to hear back from SFC whether or not we get the discount, I think $1,107.72 isn’t sustainable long-term.

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Techsoup needs a non-profit.

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This is why we have the Software Freedom Conservatory.

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Thanks for pulling those numbers together @r0bby. Is it possible to get more recent numbers from RS?

It would also be good to pull together an inventory/breakout of those line items, especially the “cloud servers”. This doesn’t have to be public if it would disclose sensitive stuff like hostnames etc., but it would be good for evaluating alternatives.

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@downey,

I don’t view hostnames as sensitive information…since we more or less have a server per app hosted… I emailed SFC to see if we can get a current breakdown, I wish I had access…I haven’t been able to even login to Rackspace’s cloud control panel…which is making me think it’s time to look elsewhere. Let’s see if we can get Cat to negotiate some free/reduced cost credits for GCP…

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So we are currently paying $1,328.86/month, breakdown is below:

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Thanks for the updated numbers @r0bby - do you have a quick bullet-point style list of the Cloud Servers that could be copied/pasted?

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Not from that bill, no. However, here you go, none of this is confidential:

Screenshot_20170918-155322
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I would like to move away from single server per project.

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If it’s really just 6 hosts, I’d definitely push for something less than $185/mo per host on average. Yikes!

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We could merge pacs and radiology and run both on one server

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I originally wanted to do that and you said no…

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That was because we had 2 different PACS — so yes ideally we should have 2 servers —

But we can downscale and run on one as we are don’t have enough resources - so we will keep one PACS -orthanc and the radiology module

We could even merge all with toolkit if @sunbiz is not opposed

Judy W. Gichoya

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I’m not making any changes yet – I really do wanna get away from Rackspace – I’m not crazy with their automation tools…or lack thereof. I am in favor of consolidation though, but nothing is happening yet.

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Just offering…if additional boxes are needed, temporary or otherwise, I got extra IP’s, pfsense boxes, and maybe some dedicated machines…and I could add some. We are already paying for more services than we are using here, and I doubt that the additional cooling would affect the electric bill much. If we are feeling really poor, and we want a near no-cost solution, I am game.

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