Given that Trusty was released almost 4 years ago, is there any plans for getting a newer platform for grid users? This is partially in relation to T183090, there are some areas where the k8s just fail. What prospects are there for moving to a newer grid exec nodes? I would start to expect that we will be seeing more and more cases of software incompatibility or security issues arise as time passes, and that given the glacial speed at which such a move would take I am surprised we have not seen the first stages of a migration already in progress.
On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 7:42 PM, John phoenixoverride@gmail.com wrote:
Given that Trusty was released almost 4 years ago, is there any plans for getting a newer platform for grid users? This is partially in relation to T183090, there are some areas where the k8s just fail. What prospects are there for moving to a newer grid exec nodes? I would start to expect that we will be seeing more and more cases of software incompatibility or security issues arise as time passes, and that given the glacial speed at which such a move would take I am surprised we have not seen the first stages of a migration already in progress.
Ubuntu Trusty is a long term stable (LTS) release. Ubuntu will continue to provide security patches for it until April 2019.
The Cloud Services team has been talking about what our migration path will be from Trusty to a newer distribution. We do not have solid plans yet, but the likely replacement will be either Debian Stretch (to keep pace with the main production network) or a newer Ubuntu LTS release (Xenial or Bionic). We will probably start a project around April 2018 to determine the migration path and then begin providing bastions and execution nodes using the new operating system to allow Tool maintainers a reasonable time to transition as was done with the Precise to Trusty migration (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tools_Precise_deprecation).
We are also still hoping to invest more effort into improving workflows and functionality for Kubernetes (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136264). Kubernetes will never provide a direct one-to-one replacement for Grid Engine. At some point however it should be possible to move most of the webservice type tools to it. If things go according to plan we will be doing some education and outreach soon to try and get more people to test their webservices on Kubernetes and either move them over or help us document the things that would need to change in order to make that movement possible. Tasks like T183090 are definitely useful for this effort.
Bryan