Urgent Call For Help: Alpine Linux Seeks New Home After Equinix Metal Sunsetting
An urgent need for assistance has been announced by the Alpine Linux project as Quinix Metal phases out its bare metal servers. These servers have long supported this container-centric Linux distribution. Now, Alpine Linux finds itself in a race against time to secure new server infrastructure and funding to manage the associated costs.
Equinix has generously hosted crucial infrastructure for Alpine Linux, however, with the transition underway, there is a craze among developers to explore alternative solutions.
The project has depended on Equinix for substantial storage services using over 800 TB of bandwidth monthly. Along with this, two servers are dedicated to continuous integration (CI) testing and another serves as a development environment.
Right now, the Alpine Linux team is on the lookout for colocation space in or around the Netherlands or, at the very least, some rack space. They also require high-performance servers that can make storage infrastructure strong. Along with this, they also require additional servers to support their CI workload testing.
They are open to considering virtual machines as the last resort if getting colocation space and capable servers turns out to be challenging. To help in this unexpected infrastructure transition, Alpine Linux is actively looking for donations to help cover the costs that are involved.
Here are the key areas where assistance is urgently required, such as colocation space. They require colocation space near the Netherlands (NLD) to make server setup as well as maintenance easier.
Replacing the infrastructure that they are losing with bare-metal servers is essential. High-performance servers for the T1 mirroring infrastructure and servers with adequate computing power to manage CI workloads for x86_64 and x86 are required.
If bare metal servers are not an option for Alpine Linux, virtual machines with enough storage, computing, and networking capabilities could offer a viable alternative for the development and CI environments.
