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
