Pandas documentation @ OVHcloud

[nabobalis]

This is a tracking issue for:

I have already briefed them on the previous agreement with OVHcloud concerning the hosting of the Pandas documentation and a portion of the MyBinder traffic. Since Project Jupyter is no longer affiliated with NumFOCUS, our primary focus should be on the hosting of Pandas, if OVHcloud is still interested in hosting the project.

@WillAyd I was told you are the best contact for Pandas.
Do you happen to know if pandas still wants to host documentation on OVHcloud or if there are plans to move to another platform?

[WillAyd]

Hi @nabobalis thanks for the ping. Who is that quoted entry from?

In the past @datapythonista has been the most involved with OVH; I have done some fact finding on that engagement recently although there is still a lot for me to learn. As far as I am aware, we historically had a signed agreement with OVH for hosting services for both our documentation and benchmark servers, although I don't believe we have any active agreement in place

As far as want pandas wants, I don't think we have a very strong opinion as long as our documentation uptime is preserved. Overall I think OVH has done a fine job (we recently had one outage, but that is the only one I can think of in years), but if we don't have a signed agreement with them and they are just donating services, there is definitely risk to our stack if they decide to stop donating.

I've chatted with the readthedocs team about hosting pandas docs, and that seems like a viable option if we move away from OVH. I don't believe readthedocs would be able to offer a benchmark server like OVH does, although I am also not well versed into how pandas may or may not be using that server currently.

cc the pandas governance team @mroeschke @Dr-Irv @rhshadrach @jorisvandenbossche as this has been a recent discussion point

[nabobalis]

There is also a RackSpace server for pandas that is being paid for by numFOCUS, does anyone at pandas recall what this server was for and if it is still needed?

@adaviesNumfocus is the one managing this now for numFOCUS.

[WillAyd]

I am personally not aware of a rackspace server being used, but if anyone else on this thread knows please chime in.

Is there any metadata attached to that purchase that might clue us in more?

[aterrel]

I use to support @TomAugspurger on this server. (which mostly mean reset his account password frequently)

[datapythonista]

No opinion on using OVH or not. OVH was great since they offered us $10k in credits, which we used for benchmarks. Just a couple we had a discussion about the benchmarks and nobody is interested in maintaining them, or continuing the work to have more accurate benchmarking. So, the server doesn't seem very useful anymore. The website has a lot of traffic, but it's just a static server, I think we can get a server for $3/month or less for it. If OVH is happy to continue, sounds great, if it's tricky to get a new agreement, no big deal in my opinion.

The Rackspace server was supposed to be shut down for the last two years. We couldn't do it online, I guess that's the only reason it still exists if that's the case.

[TomAugspurger]

I can at least confirm that I'm not using the RackSpace server, which was previously used for hosting the docs and benchmark results (not for running the actual benchmarks). My understanding (which looks like Marc confirms) is that it's not being used by the project anymore and could be decommissioned.

[adaviesNumfocus]

@aterrel @nabobalis Looks like I can go ahead and delete the Rackspace Pandas Server. Doing this now.

[nabobalis]

Just going to keep this issue open so we can track the documentation for pandas.