In Spring 2018, the board of directors resolved to abandon our physical hosting set up at Peer1 in favor of a virtual infrastructure at DigitalOcean.

1. How Infrastructure is Being Used

We are treating digital ocean as if it were a physical leased hardware provider, and are not using the non-free software-as-a-service features. This will allow us to remain provider independent and provides a straightforward path back to physical hardware if that becomes a sensible decision in the future. Essentially, instead of us running a libvirt server with VMs and block storage, the provider is. This allows us to be more flexible and adapt to changing needs quickly (e.g. block storage for AndrewFileSystem can be expanded on demand), and eliminates the overhead of leasing rack space.

2. Background

See also VirtualizedHosting2018