Hi Faidon,
thank you for your input!
On 06/07/2014 08:30 PM, Faidon Liambotis wrote:
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 - At the same time, some of these goals are /too/
specific and do not
leave much up to interpretation and deliberation.
I hope that they are specific enough to invite critical input and identify
points of contention. These plans are also not immutable, and I'm happy to
make them less specific in areas where there's more need for discussion.
- This is *a lot* of work. Are you sure you can pull
this off?
I'm cautiously optimistic. Q1 and to some degree Q2 will be tight, but it's
important for other teams to get the basic functionality done early. We have
prototypes for parts of this, so have an idea of what we are getting
ourselves into. There are also some optional items in Q3 / Q4 that could be
canceled or deferred if earlier tasks take longer than expected.
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.
The supportive role is indeed intended. Initially much of this support is
going to be in the form of building general infrastructure (storage service,
REST API, caching), but over time we'll spend more time on helping other
teams. Some of this will be supporting specific use cases, but we'll also
help other teams develop their own specialized services and API end points.
This experience will help us refine the general infrastructure, and might
also surface repeating problems that could be solved generically. Overall I
think that we should have enough capacity in Q3 & Q4 to work on this.
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 :)
I'd be very disappointed if this was the end of all technical debate. ;)
But more seriously, I think a good amount of time is going to be needed for
working with the community. This is the reason why we didn't set a deadline
for using Parsoid HTML5 for page views. Our goal is to get the technical
preliminaries in place, and then test, refine and discuss things based on
the real thing. Much of this is probably going to be handled by Parsoid and
the Community Engagement team, but we'll still need to be prepared to make
technical adjustments as needed.
(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 ;))
Indeed ;) These are (very rough) estimates of how long it might take one of
us to tackle individual tasks. So yes, FTEs with an element of planning poker.
- 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?
I don't expect major hardware needs for the storage service or REST API
before Q2. Until then we should be able to make do with little more than the
misc servers we've been using for testing so far. The smaller services
(mathoid, citations etc) will need two shared boxes for redundancy. Lets do
some more detailed planning on this soon.
Gabriel