[Long Term Strategy and Priorities] Migration of S3 Bucket Payments to Foundation

[refroni]

Listing out all options/possibilities that have been brought up or being explored for the long term improvements/resolutions/options below. Please add in anything that might be of interest to bring up/discuss/alternative options on the topic. Discussion: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nixos-foundations-call-to-action-s3-costs-require-community-support/28672 Thank you to joepie91 and raitobezarius for helping put this initial list together from the matrix/discourse discussions:

1. Tahoe-LAFS (distributed storage, not S3-compatible out of the box, can support storage nodes of any size and complexity including low-trust, but is slow) + central gateway server(s) to bridge to Fastly
2. Tahoe-LAFS but with narinfo stored directly on the central gateway server(s) for better performance
3. Garage (distributed storage, S3-compatible, flexible in storage node size, but nodes must be reliable and trustworthy, and cluster configuration must stay reasonably stable)
4. Minio (distributed storage-ish, S3 compatible, fairly rigid expectations in cluster layout, commercial so future FOSS status is questionable)
5. Single Big Server (optionally with replica) serving up the entire cache ... as owned hardware, colocated at a datacenter, with or without outsourced hardware management ... as a rented dedicated server(s), so hardware issues will be taken care of by the datacenter ... supplied by one or more sponsors
6. Running university/ISP mirror schemes like many other distros do (eg. MirrorBrain)
7. Hosting (historical) content at an academic/research institution
8. Deleting old items from the cache (irrecoverable)
9. Deleting items from staging once no longer needed
10. Aggressively deduplicating and/or compressing our storage
11. Ceph (distributed filesystem for petabyte scale, S3 compatible, industry standard, non-trivial to operate)