[tor-dev] Summary of meek's costs, April 2015

[David Fifield]

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 11:04:58PM -0400, Griffin Boyce wrote:
> Mike Perry wrote:
> >David Fifield:
> >>Here's the summary of meek's CDN fees for April 2015.
> >>
> >>total by CDN  $3292.25 + $3792.79 + $0.00 = $7085.04 grand total
> >>https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?graph=userstats-bridge-transport&start=2015-02-01&end=2015-04-30&transport=meek
> >
> >Yikes! Are these costs covered by a grant or anything? Should we be
> >running a donations campaign?
> >
> >>If you want to help reduce costs, you can
> >> 1. Use meek-azure; it's still covered through a grant for the next four
> >>    months.
> >> 2. Set up your own App Engine or CDN account. Then you can pay for your
> >>    own usage (it might even be free depending on how much you use).
> >>    Here are instructions on how to set up your own:
> >>https://gitweb.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/meek.git/tree/appengine/README
> >>https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#AmazonCloudFront
> >>https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#MicrosoftAzure
> >>    Then you will have to enter a bridge line manually. Follow the
> >>    instructions at
> >>https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Howtochangethefrontdomain
> >>    but instead of changing the "front=" part, change the "url=" part.
> >>    For example,
> >>      bridge meek 0.0.2.0:1 url=https://<myappname>.appspot.com/
> >>front=www.google.com
> >
> >Please let me know if anyone takes you up on this!
> >
> >I am happy to add the meek bridges of anyone who does this as an option
> >in Tor Browser. We can add logic to round robin or randomly select
> >between the set of meek providers for a given meek type upon first
> >install, or even for every browser startup.
> 
>   If there were some randomization logic included, I'd be happy to
> contribute an App Engine or Amazon meek access point.  If a few people did
> that, the costs might be more manageable.  But also the stats might be a bit
> harder to aggregate (which might be important if David is writing a
> thesis/paper/etc).

Thanks Griffin. At this point we'd need, what, 60 operators in order to
cost on average $30/month? At current usage rates.

I think we already have plenty of aggregated stats. It's been nice to be
able to separate cleanly amazon/azure/google, but we shouldn't try to
keep that forever at the expense of becoming more scalable.