[Cloud-announce] Assurances and Support Regarding the Grid Engine Shutdown

Hello! After our initial announcement of the Grid Engine shutdown timeline[0], some of you raised concerns about losing your tools. We want to address those apprehensions while hopefully providing reassurance. No tools will be deleted until the grid engine shutdown date on 14 February 2023. However, for tools with unreachable maintainers, an outage will happen starting on 14 December 2023[1]. This is intended to raise awareness for users or maintainers who have not otherwise been reached. A list of these tools can be found here[2]. If you are a maintainer or a user of a tool in this list, comment on the associated phabricator ticket with migration plans or a request for more support. The goal is to have a plan for all tools running on the grid. We want all actively used tools to be migrated, and will help support users of critical tools without a maintainer. Thanks for your help in identifying and migrating those tools you maintain and depend on. We acknowledge that the timeline might seem tight, and we want to clarify that our approach is to make this process as seamless as possible. We have been actively engaging with tool maintainers over the past year, and we genuinely appreciate the efforts many of you have already made to migrate your tools to Kubernetes. We will continue to work closely with maintainers who might need additional time or assistance. If for any reason you have not received a phabricator ticket for your tool, please reach out. The phabricator ticket is a good place to communicate your needs and plans for any remaining tools or jobs. This will help us further organize and plan this process. Our primary goal is to support you through this transition. If you have further concerns about the deadline or if you need assistance with the migration process, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We are available on IRC, Telegram, Phabricator[3], and through our other support channels[4]. Do you still have concerns or questions? Please let us know. We want to do this together with you, in a way which makes sense to everyone. We’re very grateful for all the hard work you do, and our only goal here is to secure the future of tools in the Wikimedia sphere, not to make your lives more difficult. Thank you! [0]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/cloud-announce@lists.wikimedia.… [1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation#… [2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation/… [3]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/6135/ [4]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge/About_Toolforge#Commun… -- Seyram Komla Sapaty Developer Advocate Wikimedia Cloud Services