Design Goals
This page lists goals the design of the echtzeit infrastructure tries to achieve and the principles though which they ought to be achieved.
Keeping Costs Reasonable
As a not-for-profit organisation, we have to keep out costs down and only spend where it is sensible to do so. The same applies to our online infrastructure.
To achieve this goal, we follow these principles:
- Wherever feasable, we host and maintain the services and applications we require by ourselves
- We use software which supports off-the-shelf hardware
- We don’t use software dependent on commercial third-partyj services (such as paid APIs)
Minimal Maintenance Efforts
Keeping the echtzeit infrastructure running should not require substantial maintenance efforts. Ideally, keeping the whole system up to date, secure and usable, should not require more than a single digit number of hours per month.
To achieve this goal, we follow these principles:
- Recurring tasks are documented, defined and automated
- We use well documented components or write our own documentation where it is insufficient
- We use components that allow for the automated installation of security patches
Avert Vendor Lock-In
The infrastructure of echtzeit shall not be depend upon a vendor of a product, service of platform. Components of the system must be interchangable without compromising the functionality of retained components and data held by the applications must be easy to export and transfer to other applications.
To achieve this goal, we follow these principles:
- We use software which make use of open standards
- We don’t use propriatary or closed file formats
- We don’t use SaaS or PaaS providers
Supporting an Open Internet
We are dependent on a healthy, open internet unincumbered by hypercapitalist interests. As such, our efforts and our own infrastructure should align with ethical and technological conventions fostering access to knowledge and technology for all.
To achieve this goal, we follow these principles:
- We only use Open Source Software
- We don’t utilize services which sell customer or user data
- We prefer platforms and services run and govern by other not-for-profit organisation