When we had an active contact with apple over ten years ago- we got them to donate two xserves, whose drives were routinely dislocated from their sata plugs in the caddies. After a while of trying to use them for production inbound mail, we gave up and relinquished them iirc to gump, which gave up on them for the aforementioned drive situatiion. We weren't entitled to any level of support and had to return them at our shipping costs once we abandoned them.
I don't remember how the most recent apple host was acquired, but again I can assure you we had no formal support channel at apple to deal with it. Which left in in violation of infra policy from day one- even with our Solaris machines at the time we got support from sun as a precondition to accepting the hardware. Eventually we bought service contracts for sun gear post merger with oracle, but that channel has dried up. So it was always a pariah because apple doesn't do anything serious in the server market and didn't see any advantage to supporting our install without us paying them for the privilege. And I doubt at this point we could even purchase one if we tried. But that's besides the point, infra has been moving to standardize on ubuntu for the last three years now. It's only a surprise to you now because the principals within infra don't do enough blogging about changes in direction, which I hope greg will fix. Sent from my iPhone > On Feb 9, 2017, at 8:38 PM, Allen Wittenauer <a...@effectivemachines.com> > wrote: > > >> On Feb 9, 2017, at 4:32 PM, Greg Stein <gst...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >> I also believe we had to pay for that box, and it wasn't cheap. > > I had it in my head that it was from the Apple hardware donation that > happened a while back, but that was a long time ago. (So long ago that it > appears to have been wiped from the ASF website.) > >> Today, our preferred model for non-Ubuntu boxes is to have other people >> own/run/manage those buildbots and hook them into our build master. > > Yup. That's how the PowerPC got added. Thus why I say it's better for > projects to start digging into corporate sponsorship. FWIW: It was not a > smooth process, but there were issues on both the donate-ees and the > donate-ers. > >> Apache Hadoop is worse for it. As Gavin has noted, just in the past year, >> we've increased our build farm dramatically. I believe the ASF is better >> for it. > > I guess I'm viewing this from a different and very selfish perspective. > Prior to your time, a lot of effort was spent by the Hadoop project on > reducing the build infrastructure footprint because the project itself was > getting bogged down, build failures (esp after 2 executors magically appeared > on the nodes), etc, etc. We moved all/most of our builds to be docker-ized to > also minimize the impact on the infra team. End result was significant > savings all around. Many jobs were shutdown, slots were opened up, builds > became more reliable, Yetus was born to share our experiences, etc, etc. The > ecosystem of projects that were running on those nodes also benefitted since > Hadoop was usually the #1 or #2 user. That said: last I checked, there have > been no new build machines added to the Hadoop pool. In fact, we usually run > at a deficit because machines are always down. (right now, we're at something > like 60% capacity: H2,H3,H7,H8,H9 are all offline). So while the build farm > may have increased for the ASF overall, Hadoop is not benefitting from a > hardware increase. We've benefitted from fixing our own build jobs and from > the infra team's work on Jenkins itself. > >> Today, if a machine goes down, >> we can spin it back up in an hour or two due to the consistency. > > Great, so I should expect for all of our nodes to come back up quickly > then, right? ;) > >> I do sympathize that our service reduction is painful. But I hope you can >> understand where the Foundation (and its Infra team) is coming from. We >> have vastly more projects to support today, meaning more uniformity is >> required. > > It is what it is. I'm not angry (anymore). While I do really appreciate a > lot of what the infra team goes through (I'm much more of an ops person than > a dev person), it just needs to be pointed out that there are impacts to > teams and that everything isn't completely 100% positive. I've resigned > myself to the fact that it's better for my own sanity to donate my time to > other things than the ASF. Most of that is related to how the Apache Hadoop > project itself is run, but there is a portion of that related to getting > burned by the infra team's changes. I think things are improving, but I'm > still very much in a wait-and-see mode. > > Thanks.
