About five years ago X.Org / FreeDesktop.org was experiencing a cloud hosting crisis with their cloud costs running out of control after losing free credits for Google Cloud and the continuous integration (CI) testing driving up expenses. They ended up switching public cloud providers over to Equinix. Equinix ended up sponsoring the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org with their cloud/hosting needs but now on short notice that is coming to an end.
Those visiting FreeDesktop.org GitLab or similar today will likely see a notice along the top of the page:
“Equinix is shutting down its operations with us on April 30, 2025. They have gracefully supported us for almost 5 years, but all good things come to an end.
Given the time frame, it’s going to be hard to make a smooth transition of the cluster to somewhere else (TBD). Please expect in the next months some hiccups in the service and probably at least a full week of downtime to transfer gitlab to a different place.
All help is appreciated.”
So now the FreeDesktop.org volunteer administrators have around three months to figure out a new solution and ideally complete the migration within that timeframe otherwise face downtime by this infrastructure used for the development of Mesa, Wayland, X.Org, and many other open-source projects.
This FreeDesktop ticket is tracking the sunsetting of their Equinix support and trying to figure out the future of their GitLab hosting and similar.
Equinix had been sponsoring three AMD EPYC 7402P servers and another three dual Intel Xeon Silver 4214 servers for running the FreeDesktop.org GitLab cluster. Plus for GitLab runners there are three AMD EPYC 7502P servers and two Ampere Altra 80-core servers.
The FreeDesktop.org GitLab burns through around 50TB of bandwidth per month.
So now they are onto brainstorming new possible clouds / data centers for running the FreeDesktop.org infrastructure. Benjamin Tissoires who does much of the FreeDesktop.org server administration is also raising the idea of having X.Org / FreeDesktop.org pay for its own servers moving forward and then working on sponsorships to cover the costs. Now with the previous situations of losing out on Google Cloud credits and then losing out on Equinix sponsorship short notice, rather than having to wrangle all new server infrastructure on short notice, if FreeDesktop.org / X.Org Foundation is paying directly for their infrastructure, they hopefully wouldn’t encounter a similar situation in the future. But then it’s also a matter of needing to recruit enough corporations to sponsor the infrastructure costs moving forward.
In any event we’ll see what they come up with before the 30 April deadline.
