On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 2:11 PM John <phoenixoverride@gmail.com> wrote:

I will also note the last time that I attempted to move to the k grid it was about as smooth as sandpaper. Giving us a shutdown date less than 30 days, and during a major holiday timeframe is really not helpful. Planning for this should have been scheduled for a window with higher user availability.

John, I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience in a previous attempt. I appreciate that you've been active in attempting to migrate away from the grid. If you have a specific phabricator ticket from your prior experience you can share, please do so. I hope everything migrates smoothly this time for you, but if not, please let us know so we can help! As an active maintainer, we want to ensure you are able to transition as seamlessly as possible.

I also appreciate the feedback on the timeline. It's important to give yourself and other maintainers a specific date you could plan against. Including the end of the calendar year is helpful for some maintainers who normally do maintenance tasks during this time. At the same time, the goal is not to stress anyone taking time away or celebrating a holiday. For clarity, the shutdown date is 14 Feb 2024, 73 days from the time I'm writing this mail[0]. So you do not need to migrate before the end of the calendar year. Please do enjoy your holidays! Migrations can be undertaken next year. Either way, we do ask for you to communicate your needs and plans for any remaining tools or jobs you maintain. The phabricator ticket is a wonderful place to do so. That will help us in planning and ensuring everyone has been informed.

Thank you,

[0]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation#Timeline

On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 2:02 PM Maarten Dammers <maarten@mdammers.nl> wrote:
Hi,

The email I received was probably well intended, but felt like a threat to sabotage my tools. The whole project already got me unhappy from the start with tasks, contrary to Phabricator etiquette [1], being assigned to me because I happened to be at the top of the list. I called out the person doing that, but I never got a reply. I guess etiquette is not enforced for staff?

I probably have about 70+ jobs spread over several accounts that are at risk. It feels like you're just dumping work in my lap without any benefit for me as maintainer. I understand you want to make it easier to maintain the infrastructure, but do you have any idea how demotivating this is?

Maarten

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Phabricator_etiquette

On 30-11-2023 16:41, Seyram Komla Sapaty wrote:

Hello, all!

Starting today we are kicking off the process to shut down Grid Engine and we want to share the timeline with you.

== Background ==

WMCS made the Grid Engine available as a backend engine for hosting tools on Toolforge - our Platform as a Service(PaaS) offering.

An additional backend engine, Kubernetes, was also made available on Toolforge.

Over time, maintaining and securing the grid has proven to be difficult and making it harder to provide support to the community in other ways because a lot of man-hours of maintenance work is spent on this.

This is mainly due to the fact that there has been no new Grid Engine releases (bug fixes, security patches, or otherwise) since 2016.[0]

Maintenance work on the grid continued because it was widely popular with the community and the Kubernetes offering didn't yet have many grid-like features that contributors came to love.

Once the Kubernetes platform could handle many of the workloads, we started the grid deprecation process by asking maintainers to migrate off the grid.[1]

Over the past year, we've been reaching out to our tool maintainers and working with them to migrate their tools off the Grid to Kubernetes.
We have reached out directly to all maintainers with their phabricator ticket IDs.

The latest updates to Build Service[2] have addressed many of the issues that prevented tool maintainers from migrating.

== Initial Timeline ==

The detailed grid shutdown timeline is available on wiki.[3] The important dates have been copied below.

* 14th December, 2023: Any maintainer who has not responded on phabricator will have tools shutdown and crontabs commented out. Please plan to migrate or tell us your plans on phabricator before that date.

* 14th February, 2024: The grid is completely shut down. All tools are stopped.

If you need further clarification or help migrating your tool, don't hesitate to reach out to us on IRC, Telegram, Phabricator[4] or via any of our support channels.[5]

Thank you.

[0]: https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/14/toolforge-and-grid-engine/

[1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation

[2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service

[3]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation#Timeline

[4]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/6135/

[5]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge/About_Toolforge#Communication_and_support

--

Seyram Komla Sapaty
Developer Advocate

Wikimedia Cloud Services
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