Use Foundation resources to support build

[mhdawson]

This has been raised by @MylesBorins in the past but I could not find the issue.

I agreed in the last meeting to open an issue to revisit the discussion. The question is should we ask the Foundation for paid resources to help improve our ability to be responsive when failures/problems occur and to make more progress overall. It feels like sometimes its hard to be responsive enough with just volunteers.

I did briefly pass the idea by Mark Hinkle and it sounds like it might be a possibility but we'd have to write down what we think would make sense in terms of what we would want.

[MylesBorins]

AFAIK there is already budget for this. /cc @mrhinkle to confirm

[jasnell]

help improve our ability to be responsive when failures/problems occur and to make more progress overall ...

This is all good, but it's not clear what is being asked for. Are we talking about the foundation hiring a devops/infrastructure person? Are we talking about just paying for better infrastructure? If there is budget allocated, what is it allocated for?

[mhdawson]

@jasnell this issue is to quantify what we want to ask for.

From my perspective I don't think we have any key issues driving a need to pay for better infrastructure as we have a pretty good set of resources (although others may have ideas).

On the other hand the challenge of keeping the CI up and running as a production system (ie there is impact when machines are down, acting up etc. in terms of slowing progress in the project) is not as good a fit with people volunteering their time as it is in other aspects of the project where asynchronous work fits very well. It may be that in this case only (build support) having a paid infra/devops person might make sense. However, I know that there is no consensus on this and I'm not 100% sure myself its a good/workable idea yet. This issue was for us to have/document the discussion on that front.

One thing that would help is if we captured pain points people are seeing so that we can assess what options would/would not address them.

[mhdawson]

I think we should discuss this again. I don't think we are keeping up or handling "urgent" issues as well as we'd like and I think we should strongly consider the option of paid resource in order to handle "urgent" issues with that paid resource being under the direction of the build WG volunteers.

It's a model that seems to have worked elsewhere (ex Apache Software Foundation)

@nodejs/build

[mhdawson]

To be 100% clear the ask would be for a paid person to handle "urgent/timely" work including things like making sure required compiler levels are on release machines etc.

[rvagg]

Rich and I will begin a strategic initiative sometime in January to do some accounting of resources and costs (people and other) and try and come up with proposals and plans for reducing pain and improving the experience for collaborators while managing quality. Or something like that. Basically we need to think more strategically about this and understand what our problems and risks are and what we can do about them.

[MylesBorins]

The foundation is in the process of working out 2019 budgets right now. If we need an infrastructure line item it would like be a good idea to have a rough idea of the budget sooner rather than later. Of course this can always be done after budgets are approved, but better early imho

One thing to consider as well is scope. Working under the assumption that a foundation merger will be happening it is worth considering if we want to make build infrastructure available to other foundation projects. An expanded scope will obviously require more work, but may also expand the circle of volunteers