Platonides wrote:
On 25/09/12 20:48, Erik Moeller wrote:
1) WMF is a technology organization. Hosting the
core infrastructure
for Wikimedia projects is very much what we do. This includes data
center operation, monitoring and backups, software deployments,
software/service upgrades, code versioning infrastructure, bug
tracking infrastructure, additional support systems and services (like
this mailing list), etc.
Toolserver is in fact hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation today, in our
Amsterdam data-center. We provide space, power and racks for the
toolserver cluster, at a cost of about $65,000/year to WMF according
to our Director of TechOps.
Something we should all be grateful for.
I think the current Toolserver setup is less than ideal and I think the
future proposed setup (Tool Labs) is even worse. Right now there's already a
heavy reliance on the goodwill of the Wikimedia Foundation to keep the
Toolserver running. Without database replication, the Toolserver is just
mediocre shared hosting.
Going forward, the situation will worsen, as the Wikimedia Foundation is
basically creating a walled garden. We're watching as the Wikimedia
Foundation puts all of the data, tools, and infrastructure behind the same
organization and then will be able to determine who does and does not have
access to this and under what terms, a step backward as far as I'm
concerned.
Redundancy and duplication in this case is a very good thing, not a bad
thing. If we had ten Toolservers (hosted by Wikimedia chapters, Amazon,
LeaseWeb, or anyone else), it wouldn't be such an issue when database
replication stopped on one of them. It might not be as efficient, but it'd
be a much safer long-term strategy, rather than putting all of the
high-speed access to data (and in some cases, the _only_ access to data
[watchlist, anonymized user preferences, etc.]) behind the Wikimedia
Foundation's control.
MZMcBride