I don't know if I'm late to the party and this has been posted for a while or if it just came out and I just happened to stumble upon it first, but ISRG (parent organization of Let's Encrypt) has a 2020 annual report posted on their home page, and it's a really good read for those interested in what's going on with the organization.
Some highlights include:
The statistics of how much Let's Encrypt has grown.
The response to the CAA rechecking bug.
Information on other projects ISRG is working on.
A bunch of sponsors. (While it's easy to think of Let's Encrypt as free, of course it's actually just "free to you because it's paid for by the sponsors". I'm particularly intrigued that there are several companies listed as sponsors that actually run their own public CAs, like at least Google (Chrome), Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (GitHub), and IdenTrust.)
And a great shoutout to this community! (I was rather bemused to see my name on the list of "forum leaders". I think that a lot of other people deserve recognition more than me; while I suppose I do occasionally poke my head into #help if there's something I think I might contribute to, there are a lot of other people where it feels like they must actually have made it a full-time job of helping people unbreak their web server configurations!)
Well, thank you very much! I really wasn't trying to fish for compliments, though, I was just trying to appreciate those of you who tirelessly help every poor soul who comes here wondering why their server doesn't work the way they think it should.
That surprised me as well. I'm kind of surprised that they needed it to fit it into 2U as one of the requirements. If it were me trying to engineer a database of that scale my first instinct would probably be to just throw it into one of the standard "cloud" providers (some of which are even sponsors of Let's Encrypt), but maybe their latency or compliance requirements mean they need to put it on site (and their constant load may mean that an on-premise solution is cheaper, too). But yes, it seems that their physical footprint in their datacenters can't be particularly big, and perhaps overly expensive if they were to want to expand their rack space.
As for me, I believe this wouldn't be the same place without you.