Reduce the technical debt in conda-forge infrastructure

[jaimergp]

📌 Summary

Audit conda-forge infrastructure to generate a roadmap that can be followed over the course of the project to improve the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem.

📝 Background

Since its emergence in 2015, the conda-forge project has seen explosive growth in contributors, maintainers, repositories, artifacts, and packages served.
To serve such a vast ecosystem (and around 300M downloads per month), the core team has heavily relied on automation, Continuous Integration and Delivery platforms and in-kind donations from multiple infrastructure providers.

Current conda-forge's infrastructure and tooling are distributed across many GitHub repositories, external CI services (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, TravisCI, Drone.io, CircleCI), Heroku "dynos" and AWS instances.
Many were built as ad-hoc fixes and currently lack documentation or risk mitigation plans.

We plan to migrate the configuration and infrastructure provisioning to reproducible, vendor-agnostic tools such as Terraform, complemented with rigorous testing, vulnerability detection, and documentation strategies to enable better security, reliability, and recovery from adverse events.

🚀 Tasks / Deliverables

See issues labeled as mission: infra 🛠

ℹ️ References

• Azure DevOps Pipelines dashboard for conda-forge
• Travis CI dashboard for conda-forge
• Conda-forge repositories that are not regular feedstocks
• Docker images