Make our CI feedback loop shorter

Originally created by @intrigeri on #16960 (Redmine)

This is about the follow-up work to #15501 (closed) that we want to do in 2019-2020, i.e.:

1. Reconsider our options → ditched the “hacker option”
2. Get in touch with ProfitBricks, that donate crazy amounts of VM “hardware” to the Reproducible Builds project. If they’re happy to give us some, this would be, by far, the simplest and cheapest option. AFAIK that’s a simple “here’s a VM, you’re root” setup so it does not have the drawbacks of more powerful & complex cloud systems, apart of course the fact we don’t run the hardware ourselves.
3. If ProfitBricks is happy to provide what we need: discuss on -summit@ if we want that (mostly a political decision), keeping this in mind: what happens if they suddenly pull the plug?
4. Wait for HPE’s answer.
5. If HPE does not sponsor us, request Tails budget for the Bare metal gaming setup in a server housing dedicated to CI
6. Implement the chosen solution.

Blueprint: https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/hardware_for_automated_tests_take3/

Attachments

• benchmarks.ods

Subtasks

• Ensure the new CI machine has TRIM enabled, which probably requires configuring VMs to use virtio-scsi disks (#11788)
• tails#17439 (closed)
• tails/sysadmin-private#41
• #17846 (closed)
• #17866
• #17857 (closed)

Related issues

• Related to #11680 (closed)
• Related to #17216
• Related to tails#17361 (closed)
• Related to tails#16959 (closed)
• Blocks #17387
• Follows #15501 (closed)