The cost of cloud hosting — or in particular hosting their own GitLab instance and running continuous integration (CI) support for FreeDesktop.org projects — is putting financial strain on the X.Org Foundation. The X.Org Foundation estimates their annual hosting expenses this year to top out at 75k USD and at 90k USD for 2021. The gitlab.freedesktop.org hosting is done within the Google Cloud. This cost doesn’t include that of any continuous integration runners but just the expenditures from storing and serving build artifacts and images from the cloud to external runners.
Due to rising costs and not having any guaranteed recurring sponsors while the current hosting costs being unsustainable, the X.Org Foundation may need to disable continuous integration (CI) functionality in the months ahead if they don’t obtain additional funding.
[Source: Phoronix]
