Thank you for not forgetting about me but what exactly do I have to do with this topic? You made it sound like I am somehow connected with that statement.
I’ve read it, and my many posts in response are reminders that excuses are not shields from criticism - expect people to respond to you based on your behavior, not your excuses for your behavior. If many members of a community I cared about were telling me that they didn’t like how I was talking to them, I’d want to take that pretty seriously.
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I couldn’t agree more. I could have approached the thread with more respect, but a crucial aspect was also to critique the excessive use of AWS in terms of finances. I wanted to express my frustration because I firmly believe that there’s no room for such things within OSM. While many individuals raised concerns about my assertive tone, as more information came to light, I found it increasingly difficult not to be astounded by the contradictory statements issued by the OWG. Initially, when I began the thread, I wasn’t fully aware of the extent of this issue. I always assumed that OSM was an organization driven by transparency. I hope you can empathize with my feelings when it turned out to be otherwise.
Additionally, I couldn’t resist addressing attempts to downplay the situation. I view this as a serious matter. I felt compelled to maintain an assertive stance, especially considering multiple instances where the conversation was being redirected, whether intentionally or not. It was crucial for me to keep the discussion focused on this single topic.
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We have a volunteer board of directors, volunteer working groups, and a (tiny) paid staff for a reason: to competently run the organization and its core services.
This dumpster fire of a thread has managed to do nothing more than waste all of those peoples’ time responding to breathless conspiracy theories by a community member that lacked the understanding of how the organization operates – and quite rudely at that – rather than adding value to OSM.
So please, in the future, if something “seems insane to you”, your next thought ought to be “so therefore I must not understand it properly because there’s a bunch of really smart people in charge.”
If you wish to be more involved in the decision-making or direction of the organization, run for a seat on the foundation or a local chapter board, volunteer for a working group, or create something of value to the greater OSM community. As I’ve noted in other threads – your participation is not required.
The manner in which you’ve chosen to interact with the well-respected community members on this thread is so utterly unreasonable that I doubt most community members would want to engage with you. I would suggest that you avoid picking fights like this if you wish to have your ideas heard and respected.
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Okay, 25,000€ in S3, what do I know.
I do believe that making OSM operations transparent is crucial. I don’t consider it a waste of time, and I apologize if you do. I’ve expressed my concerns about certain issues that, in my opinion, are very critical.
I called having 86TB in Fastly logs insane, as I believe it’s an accurate description. Fortunately, this situation no longer persists. However, I urge you to consider the surrounding context. I mentioned this as an example of what might be happening with S3, as this information seems to be not publicized.
This is the only occasion where I’ve characterized something as insane. And in my view, it’s difficult to dispute this assessment. To put it in perspective, 86TB is roughly equivalent to ~666 times the size of a 129GB OSM Planet file. That’s an immense amount of storage space devoted to log files from a CDN alone, which, at the end of the day, are just fancy text files.
Please don’t hesitate to present counterarguments if you disagree with the characterization of this situation as insane. I am open to engaging in a discussion about it. And please, don’t focus on out-of-context statements alone, please consider the complete picture.
Again, I don’t want to focus too much on the matter of 86TB log files. I brought it up once more primarily because you disagreed with my characterization of it. If you have any objections, I kindly ask you to share your reasoning.
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I hope everybody has cooled off a bit overnight 
It is a truism that people will get upset over financials, sometimes over sums that in the grand scheme of things are small. The OSMF is proud that it is a cost-efficient and frugal organisation, and that makes accusations of throwing money out of the window bite a lot harder than it would for other comparable orgs. But definitely the time to provide input on the budget be it policy (“no AWS”) or financial (“that can be done far cheaper”) is during the budget process, and I respectfully suggest if there are questions later in the year they should be directed to the treasurer (in a friendly non-accusatory manner).
We do have a bit of a financial reporting / control weakness in that currently we are are only producing annual financials. On and off there have been attempts to do this for each quarter however these have always fizzled out after a while, mainly because they are a lot of work, nobody ever looked at them and the relevant sums were small in any case. But the reason to produce them is exactly for situations like this thread, where it would be helpful to have a current comparison of financial performance vs. budget that could be pointed to when questions arise. I would consider it a good idea, particularly given that the budget has grown substantially over the last couple of years, that the OSMF would (re-)commit to producing quarterly financials again.
PS: how to account for Amazon credits and the spending of them is an interesting question, just as accounting policy wrt other in kind donations (for example Fastly). How we do this depends very much on local legal requirements, but I would suggest not to claim that there is no cost associated with any specific line item if it isn’t actually a free service.
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I would honestly recommend that people stop feeding the troll. Discourse has a great “ignore” function.
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May I ask active volunteers why they think that essential functions of OpenStreetMap should work on a voluntary basis, if at the same time the functionality of OpenStreetMap has to be significantly restricted to avoid overloading by end users. These limitations only drive a divide between contributors and users, and users are then left to rely on commercial users of OpenStreetMap data. As a result, end users of OpenStreetMap data often do not recognize the origin of the data, and a break occurs because corrections then do not flow into OpenStreetMap.
In practice, I see that many entrepreneurs, for example, update their business data very quickly in Google Maps, but do not even think of maintaining it in OpenStreetMap.
Also my question, how the influence of commercial OpenStreetMap data users on the management of OpenStreetMap is to be assessed, and how willing they are to grant OpenStreetMap more core functionality.
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I think the core idea is to treat everyone equally, meaning, almost nobody gets paid for doing anything. This of course, has its ups and downs. I think this topic would require a broader discussion, outside the scope of this thread. Let’s focus here just on the AWS and transparency issues.
I recognize here the diligent attempt to get the appearance of pure voluntary work, probably to keep actual total costs apolitical. Proper financial management makes political influence visible. The trumpeting that everything is voluntary work is supposed to keep the political influence of commercial data users opaque.
One could argue that offering work for free is a way to evade certain responsibilities. When people receive something at no cost, they often have lower/no expectations. However, when they know it’s a premium or paid product, their expectations naturally rise. But let’s not deviate from the original thread too much. You can always start a new one to discuss other topics.
So the title of this topic should really be 'why does OSMF reserve 25,000 on Amazon services?
(JIC the emergency occurs needing their services). When not used almost a gain that can be carried over to the next year, so the donations/new funding needs the next year are minus 25,000.
There’s is some confusion thrown around but this 25,000 has as I read it not made it to the P&L statement, is merely a reserve item on the BS / an item on the ‘Business Forecast’ (if one can call it that), only a projection of possible cost to operate.
To my understanding, the free AWS service are a relatively new thing. So just last year this has been a real, actual spending. Originally I found no information about the free AWS service, as all publicly available information indicates that this is still in ‘planned’ status. It’s hard to resonate on the budget when the exact terms are unknown. We can all just speculate at the moment.
I just wish OWG was more transparent about their S3 operations. Take example from https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/. Right now the public does not know what’s exactly being stored on the S3, nor what are the terms of the free AWS sponsorship.
Yes - there’s not a great way to handle the accounting. Using the two examples you gave, we can see the problems.
If we didn’t have Fastly sponsorship, we’d have to pay a CDN. At our volumes, we’d never pay the listed commercial rates, but we don’t know what price we’d get actually doing the negotiations, which we wouldn’t do unless we had to switch. We’d also probably change our usage policies, so we’d have different traffic levels. At this point, we put the risk in the budget request with a maximum cost.
The AWS render server is different. It’s important for capacity right now, but if we lost the credits, we’d go with a cheaper option than EC2. We also have a very low risk of losing credits compared to donated servers, since once the credits are in our account they’re good until they expire at a known date. If we put a cash value on the risk, it would be the capex cost of replacing it, not the dollar value of AWS credits it uses. We didn’t call this risk out in the budget, because it is minor compared to other risks, and substantially less than other donated servers.
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It is quite sad when the serious lack of communication and social skills (aggressive approach, blatantly ignoring “assume good faith” policy and other etiquette guidelines, replying when angry / ignoring “WP:NAM”, poor anger control, incessant posting of retorts, repeatedly ignoring other people suggestions to moderate as well as dis-likes as indication of problem with their writing style, continuing to enforce validating their own bad behaviour instead of noting that there must be a problem with it as so many people complain, and general argumentative and trollish behaviour, arrogant self-righteousness even in the face of facts proving them completely wrong, inability to accept and admit to others that they have been wrong and acted inappropriately etc.) completely overwhelmes the actually quite reasonable request for information and clarification and more transparency, and makes people want to just blacklist them as a troll vulgaris domesticus.
Sad, but quite understandable. It is human social behaviour 101 (what you say doesn’t matter in the least if you don’t know how to say it and do in a way that puts people in a “here comes aggressor, defend now!” mode). Hopefully OP will learn from this and acquire better communication skills to discuss issues in more civil way, and even complain if need be in more amiable and sociable way, before they get blacklisted by the majority of the community as a troll.
And yet a simple sincere apology (instead of trying to reframe the issue so they remain blameless) would suffice upon noticing community response and lash-back, e.g.
“I apologize I overracted, I misunderstood the situation and was angry, so I forgot to assume good faith and my lack of knowledge, so I inappropriately come out agressively. I however still have questions on the sucjet pertaining to XXX (like: what is the difference between XXX1 and XXX2), and would like to suggest that OSMF be more transparent about YYYY in the future, by including more information in financial reports about ZZZ. I find that important because of QQQQ”.
Simple, admitting own mistakes (instead of desperately trying to find any smaller mistake of others and “try to make them more wrong then me”), non-agressive and constructive, and yet still asking for same information in non-confrontational way. It would make people see him as a valid peer, and support the idea.
P.S. I actually connected their identity on GitHub with this identity of Discourse forum, and in my experience (on e.g. StreetComplete issue tracker) previously, they actually seem as valuable members which do want to help the OSM project. But their lacking anger management issues however might turn away most of the community unless they learn to manage it (much) better. And that would be a loss (for both sides).
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@NorthCrab You have made many implicit and explicit assumptions throughout this whole conversation. You are engaging bad faith. I will be changing the title of this thread to “Why does OSMF budget 25,000 euros on Amazon” because the implication of the current title is not accurate.
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I will also lock this thread for a couple hours.
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OpenStreetMap Ops team AWS usage.
AWS EC2 - virtual machines:
- OSM tile render server (USA) - $3500/month (including data transfer which is ~50% of cost)
palulukon.openstreetmap.org Fully sponsored, no cost to OSM. Would find alternative if not sponsored. EC2 On-Demand, potential to optimise using Spot Instances, but significant ops investment required.
AWS S3 - object storage:
Summary: 272TB used. Growth of 3% per month.
Quoted amount include data transfer, API usage and storage costs.
-
openstreetmap-storage-backups - 112.4 TB - $120/month
Backups including some historical. Backups are not de-duped by design (heavy admin / risk burden). Some opportunity to manually cleanup, but very low priority. No automatic cleanup. -
openstreetmap-planet - 71.1 TB - $100/month
Historical and current copies of published planet files. Deep-Archive, for future restore to AWS hosted planet service with full back catalog. No automatic cleanups. -
openstreetmap-tile-aggregated-logs - 32.1 TB - $125/month
Archival of processed tile CDN usage logs. Historical reference for Ops to work out tends and usage patterns. More data here than provided by public logs: Index of /tile_logs @pnorman can clarify. -
openstreetmap-wal - 28.7 TB - $400/month
Live streaming “Write Ahead Log” copies of the OpenStreetMap core Postgres database. The WAL files are used for syncing follower instances of the core Postgres database server. Vital asset to our data recovery plans. Can be used for recovery between full weekly database backup or corruption. For clarity this database is private and not published via planet data (eg: messages, users etc). Automatic cleanup after 1 year. -
openstreetmap-imagery-backups - 18.2 TB - $35/month
Backups of imagery provided to OpenStreetMap. Deep archival. Primarily backups of imagery hosted on kessie. No automatic cleanups. -
openstreetmap-fastly-logs - 5.3 TB - $125/month
Inbound fastly CDN logs for processing. Key to us finding and managing abuse, source for publish tile log analysis: Index of /tile_logs Automatic Cleanup after 31 days. -
openstreetmap-gps-traces - 2.8 TB - $80 to $225/month (varies due to access by website users)
The GPS traces that are uploaded to OpenStreetMap.org, the storage backend for website: Public GPS Traces | OpenStreetMap Formerly provided by NFS service, moved to S3 to simply admin burden and to seamlessly work across our hosting data centres. No automatic cleanup, but opportunity to improve costs with S3 “tier” lifecycle rules. -
openstreetmap-fastly-processed-logs - 1.9 TB - $50/month
Archival of processed tile CDN view logs. Historical reference for Ops to work out tends and usage patterns. More data than provided by public logs: Index of /tile_logs @pnorman can clarify. -
openstreetmap-user-avatars - 113.1 GB - $5/month
The user “avatar” images as uploaded by users. No automatic cleanup, but opportunity to improve costs with S3 “tier” lifecycle rules. Formerly provided by NFS service, moved to S3 to simply admin burden and to seamlessly work across our hosting data centres. -
openstreetmap-aws-cloudtrail - 76.0 GB - $2/month
Storage backend for AWS Cloudtrail API access logging service. Security monitoring. No automatic cleanup. -
openstreetmap-gps-images - 62.7 GB - $10/month
The processed display images used by OpenStreetMap.org on Public GPS Traces | OpenStreetMap
Formerly provided by NFS service, moved to S3 to simply admin burden and to seamlessly work across our hosting data centres. -
openstreetmap-backups - 21.1 GB $0.03/month
Historical database backups from OSM in first few years. No automatic cleanup.
Please remember all storage solutions also carry an ongoing human administrative / management overhead cost which is not accounted for in the above numbers.
Other AWS services
We also use AWS like Cloudtrail, Athena, Glue, etc. There are all minimal expenses (<$20/month) or covered by free tier.
Usage of Credits
All costs above have been covered by AWS credits since Nov 2022. The credits cannot be used for purchasing Savings Plans or Reserved Instances etc which can be used for offsetting / reducing future costs. See AWS credits FAQ. Credits are valid for 1 year and any unused credits expire. Credits cannot be exchanged for cash. Crypto Mining is not a permitted use of credits. 
Credits need to be requested annually from AWS and it is not guaranteed we will get credits and this is why we have a budget line item for contingency.
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