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The year 2015 brought some challenging and thrilling developements regarding the ongoing restructuring of our infrastructure.
At the beginning of the year, the migration of our exisiting virtual machines and bare metal machines was ongoing after an extensive test phase of the new virtualization platform.
The virtualization platform consists of 3 Servers, each with 256GB RAM and 64 CPU cores and quite a lot of HDD space. One of the machines is meant to be used exclusively by developers for crashtesting. These machines are all hosted at manitu in St. Wendel, Germany. The personal and responsive support of manitu, together with the flexibility in their offerings allowed the setup of a private network between these machines and others that manitu offered to provide housing for us.
After some problems with the software for the new virtualization platform that were already covered extensively, much work went into providing setting up more an more virtual machines where services run isolated from each other. This already led to the move of the hosted blog to one of our own machines. This allows more control over installed plugins and gives more flexible control over the WordPress-setup that is used.
During the Hackfest at the University of GranCanaria work went into making the used Salt-States more easy to hack on by people who want to get involved in our infra. This also resulted in a tutorial video on how to setup a developement environment for our infrastructure.
Monthly infra calls were also setup, taking place every last Wednesday of the month at 1700 UTC. They resulted in the creating of a weekly maintenance window for server upgrades, reboots and major configuration changes. The maintenance window is every Monday, 0300-0500 UTC.
During the calls the community decided to upgrade the base operating system to Debian 8 during the next few months. This was already carried out for one of our virtualization hosts during the newly setup maintenance window to check for any problems that may occur during the update. During the upgrade, some obstacles were identified and workarounds to allow smooth upgrades were set in place.
The friendly and generous offering by Thomas Krenn, a major server supplier in southern germany, will allow for the setup of two additional Windows-buildbots with powerful dual CPUs and high speed SSDs, and two more Linux-buildbots with the same specs. These buildbots will also be housed at Manitu and connect to our growing intranet there. Two more servers from Thomas Krenn will be housed Manitu and at Adfinis SyGroup in Switzerland and provide external Backup-Space. It is planned to connect all TDF-owned hardware with a VPN, forming a world-wide intranet.
In the second half of the year, more machines were migrated to Debian 8, including the two hypervisors still running Wheezy. Due to the huge success of the Thomas Krenn build bots, two more were ordered and now extend the intranet at Manitu, with a high performance cloud core router from Mikrotik becoming the central connection point of our intranet. The cloud core router also servers as a VPN provider for TDF members at areas with restricted internet access, such as the LibreOffice conference in Aarhus, Denmark in October.
As the number of servers that are from Thomas Krenn we decided to migrate our monitoring platform to TKmon, running on a high available virtual machine that is separated from the rest of our infrastructure at filoo. TKmon integrates with the support from Thomas Krenn and notifies them of hardware failures automatically. TKmon is open source software and uses tools such as icinga and pnp4nagios.
To be more flexible with the monitoring notifications, I wrote a tool called TMB that provides a bot for the Telegram chat service and sends notifications to admins. This happend with the help of PyCharm, a great python IDE from JetBrains, who provide free licenses for Open Source projects.

The current state of the infrastructure consists of 3 rented hyperisors at Manitu, each with 4 CPUs, 256 GB RAM and 8 HDDs and partially SSDs. Additional rented servers are one backup server and one website stand-in-host that was needed after the virtualization problems occured at the beginning of the year and that will be decomissioned soon. 9 housed servers from Thomas Krenn with Intel SSDs and powerful dual CPUs are only reachable in the intranet, with access to it being controlled by the core router. On the hypervisors, there are currently 31 VMs, providing services such as AskBot, Wordpress, Gerrit, Bugzilla, Jenkins, Moztrap and much more. At Hetzner there are currently 4 Servers, one that contains the Wiki, Mirrorbrain and our public mailing lists, one that is for internal services, and 2 Backup hosts, one that provides storage capacity of over 17TB and is currently being set up.

[http://salt-states-base.readthedocs.org/en/latest/_images/graphviz-e3bf01d100863ffbfeac9749c2e64792b346879d.png]

Much of our documentation and many of our salt states are published now at https://github.com/tdf/salt-states-base, the compiled documentation can be found at http://salt-states-base.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. The salt-states are now tested with travis, the build results are at https://travis-ci.org/tdf/salt-states-base. It is therefore now very easy to contribute to developement and improve the documentation. Just fork the repository and create a pull request, the results will automatically be tested in travis. If you want to contribute to the infrastructure of our projects, you are invited to join our monthly infra calls, the next taking place on January 20th, 1800 UTC or introduce yourself to the infra team in #tdf-infra at freenode. 

Updated the text.

Please keep in mind I need this ideally by tomorrow, the latest by Friday, so we can proceed

Just to be on the safe side:
Before publishing, please get my approval - I'll have a look ~next week
I need to coordinate a few things before we go live :)