[members-discuss] Questions about the published Draft Agenda and Supporting Documents

Dear Erik,

Thank you for your questions and comments.

Following the GM with the two-thirds majority decision not to increase the membership fees for 2024 and seeing that the 2023 income would be less than budgeted, we started to look for immediate cost savings. At the Executive  Board meeting in July
https://www.ripe.net/about-us/executive-board/minutes/2023/minutes-167th-executive-board-meeting  

The board’s direction was to “to focus on cost-saving as much as possible rather than stopping activities at this point. Changes in activities must be discussed with the members in, for instance, Open Houses and at the next GM.”

Further, the Board suggested aiming for a break-even budget for 2024, including revenue at risk. I also shared that bringing costs down in the same order of magnitude in 2025 will not be possible without reducing services. 

Following this guidance, while considering potential inflation of 5% in 2023 following the 10% inflation in 2022, we have had to find cost cuts of 2M EUR or 5% of costs (5% inflation over 2023 would effectively mean 9.5% in savings - high inflation makes the budget tighter while lower inflation can provide some more space).

The Information Technology budget has been reduced by 761 kEUR from 4,261 kEUR in 2023 to 3,500 kEUR in the proposed budget for 2024. This is an 18% reduction and second to the cut in consultancy costs.

Note that the IT budget across the whole RIPE NCC, which can be found in the Income and Expenditure statement on page 10, is different from the budget for Information Services consisting of the measurement services, IT and DNS services.  

We have done a re-organisation this year to move all technology areas under one CTO, Felipe. I fully trust that he is on a path to align development processes across the teams and IT management processes. He has naturally focused on the initiatives with the most impact first.

When it comes to the measurement services, Atlas and RIS, that collect a large amount of data, we presented to the Executive Board our plans to re-engineer the back-end of these services, currently served by a Hadoop cluster in rented data centre space in Amsterdam. The plan is to move to rented bare metal, which gives us the flexibility to scale it up or down, depending on future budget constraints, and also a tiered storage solution for historical data which will further reduce costs. We will also suggest to the MAT Working Group to start a task force to work on Data Retention Principles for the RIPE NCC measurement services. For the measurement services, RIPE Atlas, RIPEstat and RIS, we have reduced the budget by a total of 300k.

When it comes to stopping services, I believe that requires further discussion and analysis. We must discuss this thoroughly with the RIPE Community in the relevant working group and with the membership. We are using the RIPE NCC Survey as a basis for this. I will start this discussion with the EB in the December board meeting. Sunsetting a service may, in some cases, take some time due to existing contracts. I am very aware of this, and we question the long-term renewal of all significant supplier agreements to make sure we have the necessary freedom to make changes going forward.

I would like to end by saying that I believe the stability of the RIR system is very important, and changes to the RIPE NCC should be done incrementally so as not to cause any disruption.

I am looking forward to further discussion on the list an at the upcoming RIPE meeting.

Sincerely,

Hans Petter Holen
Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer
RIPE NCC

> On 1 Nov 2023, at 20:15, Erik Bais <ebais at a2b-internet.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Hans Petter, 
> 
> Thank you for providing the supporting documents for the GM in Rome. 
> 
> Before we are going to be in Rome, I have a question for you and I cc:'ed the member-discuss ML, as I'm sure some other members might also have a couple questions on the following topic. 
> 
> I would like to ask you, how the RIPE NCC thought it was a great slide to present just a 2Milj Euro budget cut .. as if it was the best it could do .. given that it was stated on the last GM .. that it wasn't going to increase the budget ..
> And with the inflation, basically what that means .. you need to cut cost and cut hard ... 
> 
> So I would assume that the Director of the NCC .. would see this as an opportunity ... and discuss with management and staff, what is excessive .. and where can we 'kill our darlings' ... 
> 
> As for any writer that needs to do proper editing of a long novel .. I get the feeling that you didn't went/wanted to go through that process .. not as fierce as that the membership have suggested you to do .. 
> And I would suggest that this budget document, need some serious editing ... 
> 
> One of the reasons for my disbelieve that you did that process already properly .. is that if I see an IT spend of 7.6 milj. Euro (2023 ) and you proudly present that the IT spend for 2024 is going to be 7.4 milj Euro .. 
> 
> Either you have a HUGE technical debt that you can't manage .. or you didn't went head to head with your CTO / IT Director ... and stopped asking for more cuts until he actually sad in your office crying in despair. 
> 
> 
> Just an example ... 
> If I'm correct, the RIPE NCC is currently in a datacenter facility in Amsterdam .. with roughly 80 cabinets filled with $random equipment, almost half of that (most likely as my gut feeling is ) to store and hold every single ICMP ping/trace life on disk etc.. since the conception of the Atlas project.. 
> 
> And the best you can come back to the community is .. we've managed to reduce the cost of Atlas with 50.000 euro p/yr ? 
> The proper question to ask is, do we need every freaking completed test to store that into infinity on spinning disks .. because we never asked the community if we can just through away every PING test result after 60 days . and save 20 cabinets in storage, equipment and power usage. 
> 
> Who are you kidding ... 
> 
> And that colocation / hw cost is next to the already half milj. Euro charge for the public cloud (AWS) already (per year..) 
> 
> So I seriously wonder if you asked the right questions instead of just tried to maintain the status quo ... 
> 
> One of those 'services' that I seriously think that the NCC should step away from .. is providing 'secondary' DNS server for reverse dns .. I mean .. come on .. how hard is that for the community to manage that by themselves .. 
> and just because the NCC did that since the conception of the NCC ( or at least longer than I can remember ) .. is that still something that people use and expect the NCC to provide ? 
> 
> 
> It might be good suggestion to setup an impartial task force / audit team.. reporting to the Executive Board (EB) .. that does (IT) spending audits .. looking for projects that are WAY over budgets, technical debt, overspending due to historic reasoning etc.. 
> These should be externals to the RIPE NCC (staff), but with lots of different views and know how to spot a pet project when they see one .Or project, because we always did it that way. 
> And then report to the EB with suggestions on how to act on it. 
> 
> I think it is then up to the EB, to discuss those findings internally and decide to have the discussion with the RIPE NCC Management on how to change and reduce the technical debt and how to actual cut cost. 
> 
> I have a gut feeling that the EB isn't getting all the information during the EB meetings or during the follow up's or it takes AGES to obtain the information or it is based on consolidated info, with 3 layers of management cutting and rewriting in between. 
> 
> The "Kill Your Darlings Audit Team" ( KYDAT ), should be the fresh look, to see if the NCC is still doing the right things .. and if the RIPE NCC management is managing towards a more agile and leaner future. 
> 
> This doesn't mean .. let's host everything at the public cloud and see how long the credit card keeps clearing .. it means that common sense with eye's from the outside of the RIPE NCC, might help to provide a better insight. 
> 
> The benefit of KYDAT is that they aren't 'burdened' with employee politics or with smoke and mirrors of certain management that is withholding / stalling documents of how bad it really is .. they will look for themselves .. and report and suggest. 
> 
> I don't envy the role that you have been tasked with ... 
> 
> But I was expecting something more serious .. 
> 
> Regards,
> Erik Bais 
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