A friend and I were arguing whether a "shared devops platform" servicing OSS projects, would be helpful! Many OSS communities I've interacted with, have very little time and resources. Setting up your typical servers (CI/CD, irc, mailing-list, web servers, DBs...etc) just eats a lot of time, let alone baby sitting all this software (security patching, backups...). Yet, almost every OSS project has to do almost all of that.
So HN, do you think a standardized devops platform where any OSS project can get managed standard software stacks helps OSS projects thrive faster? What would that platform look like ?
These have nothing to do with "devops", however you would define it. Please don't overload already vague term with your own invented meaning.
> Setting up your typical servers (CI/CD, irc, mailing-list, web servers, DBs...etc) just eats a lot of time [...] Yet, almost every OSS project has to do almost all of that.
No, they don't have to do virtually any of that (barring a trivial web server).
There's very little projects that would really use continuous integration system. Just having tests that are easy to run is typically more than enough.
You don't really want to keep your own IRC server. Use Freenode, people hang out there already to talk about open source projects.
Web server usually just needs to host some static files, which is trivial, and if it needs to host custom application (e.g. demo of the project), it needs custom work anyway. Where is database for static files, I have no idea.
The only really cumbersome thing is hosting a mailing list, but for smaller projects a dedicated mailing list isn't that useful, and larger projects should want to keep control over this service anyway.