• 11/01/2022 SWGEmu and Service Provider Change

    SWGEmu and Service Provider Change

    11/1/2022
    The SWGEmu Team



    Many of you know we moved our servers in 2017 to packet.net's bare metal servers. Through a gracious arrangement with packet.net, we were able to secure multi-year discounted prices that gave us the considerable resources we needed to run our services. In March 2020, Equinix acquired packet.net and continued to honor our contract. However, as they look to optimize their data center footprint, they have decided to shut down packet.net's old data center that hosts our services. They have given their customers until 30 November 2022 to shut down all servers in the old data centers.

    We are looking into solutions where we can get bare metal hosts or one of the top three public cloud providers near the same geolocation as our current servers (EWR - New Jersey). The requirements for our servers are quite high compared to basic shared hosting, while our latency and reliability requirements go beyond many “cheap server” providers. Our current systems have 256G or RAM, Intel CPUs with 48 Threads, and 960G of mirrored SSD/NVME storage combined with 10Gbs access to the internet with 4TB of outbound transfer. Our previous deal with packet.net provided all this for about $1,200.00 USD/month.

    The publicly listed cost for equivalent servers in the new Equinix data centers is about 2.7 times more expensive than our current monthly costs. Unfortunately, our current donations will not support those costs, so we need to optimize our services. To this end, we will be running an event to bring Basilisk to a final conclusion, and we will be testing other service providers to find a price/quality match that will meet our needs going forward.

    This move is complicated; most people don't know how complex our environment is. We have 35 services running, including registration, forums, archives, support portal, servers for Login, Nova, TC-Prime, Finalizer, Basilisk, DevOps: Jenkins, Gerrit, and build tools. These are all managed in a Kubernetes cluster across the worker nodes.

    While we will do our best to make the move painless for the community, it's important to remember we are a 100% volunteer org, and our team members have day jobs, family, friends, and other commitments outside the project.

    In the coming days, the EC team will announce an event to end Basilisk so we can avoid moving more than 650Gigs of disk usage, 128G of ram usage, and many Terabytes of backups. This is the first in several steps we will take to simplify our environment to optimize for cost and reduce the time needed to move our services to new hosting.

    When we are ready to cut-over Finalizer, we will post a notice on the actual date of the move both on the forums and in-game. We will move other services incrementally as we progress to the new environment, hopefully with minimal disruption.







    Thank You,

    ~SWGEmu Staff
    This article was originally published in forum thread: 11/01/2022 SWGEmu and Service Provider Change started by Lolindir View original post