After talking with both Arturo and Birgit about things we might
present at Wikimania, I came up with this abstract for a talk:
Co-creating platforms and products: how the Wikimedia Cloud Services
team works with the larger Wikimedia technical community to build and
maintain Cloud VPS, Toolforge, Quarry, PAWS, and more
Did you know that volunteers are involved in planning, building, and
maintaining the Cloud VPS and Toolforge projects as co-equals with
paid staff from the Wikimedia Foundation? Since the start of the
"Labs" project in 2011, one of the guiding principles for WMCS
projects has been improving collaboration between Foundation staff and
technical volunteers. Learn more about some of the policies and
practices that are used to make this collaboration possible.
The submission would be under either the "governance" or "technology"
tracks. I think it would work best as a panel discussion that is
either "hybrid" (some folks in Singapore, some on-line) or
pre-recorded video.
I think this is something that folks in the community might be
interested in learning a bit about. I also think it would be
interesting for those of us who have participated in this process to
take some time to reflect on how we have worked together in the past
and how we might like to see those those processes and practices
evolve in the future. To make this talk work well there should be
active voices from both the paid and volunteer staff involved. Towards
that end, I'm mailing the cloud-admin@ list + 4 of you that I know
have been active in the past in helping with Toolforge and/or Cloud
VPS admin and features work to gauge your interest in participating.
Thoughts?
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Technical Engagement Wikimedia Foundation
Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808
Hello Admins,
The build service is ready for the next phase, and we want to get some
early users to test it and give early feedback!
This next step is going to start this Monday, when around 100 tool
maintainers will kindly receive an email asking them to try and test the
service.
The full list will be made available in the task [1]
You can read a draft of the email here[2]
Later next week, there will also be a session at the Athens Hackathon
(thanks Slavina!) [3] introducing the build service to some new users too,
as new user experiences give an important perspective too.
We will tentatively stay in this period of feedback for ~1 month. At that
point we will sit back, reflect on the feedback (will share the thoughts
with you too), and decide if we are ready for a broader announcement
(cloud-announcement, blog post, …, to be defined), to start getting wider
input.
In preparation for this, the team (including volunteers) has been working
on setting up some minimal information on wikitech [4] and phabricator [5].
Feel free to add comments to the talk page [6] and/or make changes and
fixes to those pages.
There's still many things to figure out, and many more will show up during
this phase, your help and input will be critical in shaping this service.
I encourage you to try it out yourself if you have not, and open any bugs
that you find or feature requests that you think would be useful, find the
links for those in the feedback page [7].
You can see a more detailed planning in the task [1] (feel free to add
comments there too)
Thanks for your continued support!
[1]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T335249
[2]: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/tQr7TQr20xorkEXXk6Pj
[3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336055
[4]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service
[5]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/6529/
[6]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Toolforge/Build_Service
[7]:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service#Feedback
--
Seyram Komla Sapaty
Developer Advocate
Wikimedia Cloud Services
Hi there,
in the last quarter, we conducted a research [0] to evaluate and rethink how we
deploy and offer Clod VPS (openstack), i.e, our IaaS setup.
The research results were written into a wiki page [1] which summary being that
the most attractive option for us is to move to a kubernetes + openstack-helm
deployment of Cloud VPS / openstack in the future.
This project is not trivial, and may be actually a multi-year project, so when /
why / how this project will start is yet to be decided.
The wiki page [1] contains plenty of details about everything related to the
project. Also, a bunch of open questions and unknowns. Feel free to point to
gaps or missing information bits in the plans.
regards.
[0] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T326758
[1]
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Cloud_Services_team/Enhanceme…
--
Arturo Borrero Gonzalez
Senior SRE / Wikimedia Cloud Services
Wikimedia Foundation