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  2. [URGENT] Impending deletion of Helm 2 releases and charts buckets

Re: [URGENT] Impending deletion of Helm 2 releases and charts buckets

Matt Farina
 

From what I have been told, it's not technically possible to transfer the project.

To add some context about cost and history...

We have seen numbers on what it would cost to host these through Google Cloud. The numbers, if I understood what I saw right, is the public cost rather than the internal cross charge cost. It's a larger number than I ever expected and a cost I'm very hesitant to ask the CNCF to cover as an unexpected expense. Especially during these times.

If there were a bunch of unused Google Cloud Credits laying around I would be happy to use them. But, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Just know, the cost to the CNCF would be substantial.

One of the problems is the hard coded URLs in the Helm client. This was all setup in early 2016 when Jack Greenfield and Ville Aikas were major Helm contributors on behalf of Google. The bucket setup (as with all the Helm Google Cloud services) were setup through Google corp accounts. Googlers controlled them and do to this day.

The lack of ownership by the project has been a pain point. But, older Helm v2 clients are stuck with it (can't do a redirect) and many of them are still in use. The version use across Helm versions is rather large.

What we want is to deprecate the charts repository (headed toward a distributed route) while still keeping things available for people. That includes old versions of charts.

I hope that context helps.

- Matt Farina

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020, at 2:10 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
On 10/14/20 10:52 AM, Matt Farina wrote:
> 
> There are two things worth noting...
> 
>  1. Many of the charts people use have been slower to move out of the
>     stable and incubator repos than expected. We are still finding them
>     new homes. So, not everything is deprecated. There are many useful
>     things there.
>  2. There is more use of the stable and incubator repos than I ever
>     expected. I'm told the use is growing even as things move off it.
>     When I recently saw some numbers I was amazingly surprised. I had
>     expected it to be lower. Note, I don't have access to this data. The
>     buckets are Google owned/managed so only they have access to this. I
>     think Vic is the only one of the Helm maintainers with access to this.
> 
> Many people will have some pain when the stable and incubator repos go away.

My question is: is the *Helm project* asking for the CNCF to fund
extended storage for these charts, or not? (assuming this is technically
possible).  I can see why the answer might be "not"; we have break the
links to the old locations sometime, and why not now?

The request to the TOC came from a concerned contributor, not from the
project leadership, as far as I can tell.

For my part, I would not want to see the TOC messing with a project's
official deprecation plans without a formal project request.

-- 
--
Josh Berkus
Kubernetes Community
Red Hat OSPO
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