Hi.
I've been a big proponent of the idea that we should work toward the creation of multiple Toolservers. Redundancy in this area would be a good thing. Setting up infrastructure that allows any person with an AWS account or extra server capacity to set up and run their own full Toolserver (that is, set up real-time database replication + shared hosting) would be great.
That said, I think it would be foolish to ignore the fact that the German Toolserver is slowly dying and that Wikimedia Labs is its natural successor. There was an IRC office hours earlier today and my takeaway from it was that Labs is on the right path, but that it isn't marketing itself well.
Lately, the Toolserver has been horribly unstable. Web tools stop working, queries are killed, databases are corrupt, replication lag hurts, and everything feels overloaded and tired. Labs should better advertise itself as a robust, stable hosting platform. Stability is important to developers with limited time, who don’t want to spend their time debugging hosting issues. The Toolserver had a tendency to make breaking changes (changing the operating system, changing the type of Web server, killing and then resuscitating support for Vixie cron, requiring the use of SGE, etc.). Labs should implement and emphasize a better approach to these hosting issues, to garner adopters and supporters.
Database replication came up yet again in the office hours. Many developers (myself included) seem to be holding off on Labs until database replication is up and running. The sooner this can happen, the better. But the remaining sticking point seems to be cross-database joins, which people in the office hours suggested using federated tables or application logic to replace. It would help if the Labs folks could better explain _why_ cross-database joins won't be supported (I think most developers would agree with the reasoning) and offer better guidance and documentation for how to work around this hurdle. (For example, what is a federated table?)
Yes, there will always be some contingent that's upset at the seemingly underhanded way in which Labs was brought into the world (simply announced one day, with the implicit acceptance that the German Toolserver would be put down in time or left to rot), but I think there are far more people who don't support or are ambivalent toward Labs when these people could and should be proponents for it. Labs just needs a bit better public relations, in my opinion.
MZMcBride