Proposals for Reducing Infrastructure Costs

[Rub21]

During the biweekly meeting with @batpad @erictheise @1ec5 , after reviewing the current status of our infrastructure https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/issues/issues/861#issuecomment-2430070614 , we discussed several ideas to reduce monthly infrastructure costs. One of the proposals is to explore services like Hetzner Matrix RX- https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx, which could be a viable option for migrating our infrastructure. This is a topic we need to discuss further with the entire team

cc. @jeffreyameyer @danrademacher

[danrademacher]

The incremental savings over in #861 seem really great -- right-sizing resources based on data about actual usage.

Moving off of AWS onto Hetzner makes me a bit nervous. Some considerations:

• We have a lot invested in the specific alphabet soup of AWS (such as Planet data on S3, DNS on Route 53, etc)
• AWS is widely used and at least somewhat widely understood, so it seems a bit more resilient to changes in the dev team over time

However, I do agree that high monthly infrastructure costs make the project difficult to sustain if/when funding is in question.

I wonder if related to this we should revisit #699 and see if there are opportunities for AWS credits or other data-for-good supports that could diversify our sources of ongoing infrastructure funding.