Discussion: Experimental service and path to production-grade

[mrkvon]

I heard being said that solidcommunity.net is experimental and without any guarantees. What does that mean in practice, e.g. in terms of security, availability, backups, long-term plans? What would it take to make it stable - is this some specific devops issue, or some specific CSS issue, or both, or something else?

Since there are plans by ODI to host a non-experimental Solid Server, I think focusing on open-source and helping it mature to production would be great idea! Yes I know there is the ESS license, but investing in open-source is a healthy long-term strategy.

[jeswr]

I heard being said that solidcommunity.net is experimental and without any guarantees.

Yes - and this has always been the case.

The acceptable use policy is largely the same as what was on solidcommunity.net prior to ODI taking stewardship of Solid. When the service was migrated from NSS -> CSS there was a period in which the policy text had not been moved to the registration page. solid-contrib/pivot#111 restored that text.

What does that mean in practice, e.g. in terms of security, availability, backups, long-term plans?

We have good security practises in place; but cannot provide guarantees because (1) the CSS being is a research prototype, not production-ready software, (2) and we have limited resourcing for dev-ops.

Availability: we will do a best-effort with up-time. In practise, the ODI has 1 person working 0.5 FTE on dev-ops for all of our work on Solid - including solidcommunity.net. Hence we cannot provide guarantees on availability, though we will attempt to resolve any outages as quickly as possible.

Backups: DigitalOcean takes daily snapshots of the server. This can be used to restore data in case of an outage

Long-term plans: We plan to continue to supporting solidcommunity.net.

I will leave this ticket open to get this text refined and added to the sign-up page.