Is `www` still needed, and if so what should its role be?

[sxa]

This was discussed in a recent build workgroup call. Do we still need the www server? It was originally set up to serve downloads of Node.js and the website. The website is now on Vercel and downloads are staged on the www server during the release process but hosted on R2 for public access. This may mean that the server we refer to as www could be replaced, although as a backup of our release artefacts it may still have some value.

Thoughts can be added into this issue. We should clarify exactly what it being used for in case some use cases have not been captured in the above introduction and use that to determine precisely what would be required by any replacement system.

Related issues:

• Out of space on www server #3157
• DigitalOcean www server #3424

[richardlau]

It still:

• Checks (cron) to see if the nightly and v8-canary HEAD commits and trigger Jenkins builds if they have changed.
• Automatically promote (cron) nightly builds.
• Stage release builds. Release process has the releasers ssh into the machine to download the SHASUMS, sign locally and then re-upload as part of the promotion script.

There's also a metrics script being run by cron that I have no idea whether is being used by anything or a relic of pre-CloudFlare proxying.