On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 10:21:29AM -0700, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
Matt & I have published our draft goals for the nascent Services team [1] at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Services/Roadmap
Your feedback would be much appreciated.
- These goals are vast and in very exciting in general. Clearly the team has a vision and a lot of thought has been put into compiling this big list of tasks. Kudos to both of you for writing this up and sharing it with us, this is incredibly useful!
- At the same time, some of these goals are /too/ specific and do not leave much up to interpretation and deliberation.
For some of these, we haven't agreed if they're towards the direction that we're going to take (minor example: "leverage packages as much as possible for deployment, DRY") and the goals process is not really the proper forum to make those decisions.
Making them a bit more abstract ("work on improving our production deployment strategy") would help keep our options open and avoid misunderstandings when the time comes.
- On a more specific note, I'm still personally in doubt on whether the MWCore team has signed off on a) the storage service plans b) static Parsoid HTML5 for all page views plan, especially in the detail articulated in your goals. As this is a big part of your plan for next year, I think it's worth clarifying.
- This is *a lot* of work. Are you sure you can pull this off?
As more of these core services get deployed, you're going to incur some of the costs supporting those deployments. This is essentially the "ops problem" of scheduling work; both us and MWCore know well how this can throw off our plans and schedules and we tend to account for it. Have you considered this?
Moreover, my impression of the team's charter is that it will also have a supportive role to other teams that want to write or use services. I see you've accounted for some of that (e.g. mobile) but I think you should probably expect more of it as SOA catches up within the foundation.
Finally, I think you should expect some (healthy, I hope!) amount of debate and consideration for certain things you intend to do, something that can also be quite time-consuming, obviously :)
(what are the week numbers in parenthesis supposed to be, btw? Is this FTE? If so, e.g. Q2 accounts for 18 weeks for Gabriel, probably a bit too much for a single quarter ;))
- Several of the things listed there will require hardware, possibly a non-trivial amount of it. Could you make a very rough list of your expectations so that we can plan for it, or is it too early to tell?
Regards, Faidon