On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 4:22 AM, billinghurst <billinghurst@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh my giddy aunt, was there a brain fade among all the communications
around this matter. Didn't someone think that the jargon of "pmtpa" and
"eqiad" needed some explanation? In retrospect do you think that the
statement "new instance creation disabled in pmtpa, only available in
eqiad" is going to make sense to 99.9% of the eyes around the wikis where
we are 'ambassadors'?

You know you could have just asked, right? :-P Part of the point of the ambassadors list is to be the conduit, which means sometimes the jargon is going to creep in, but it's also perfectly fine to ask what these things mean on list.

Our Operations team has a five letter abbreviation for all of the datacenters. The first two letters are the vendor responsible, and the last three are airport code for the nearest airport to the datacenter. "pmtpa" is the datacenter in Tampa, "pm" standing for hosting company Power Medium (now Hostway), and "tpa" being the airport code for Tampa International Airport[1]. "eqiad" is our Equinix-operated datacenter in Ashburn, Virginia, which is near Dulles International Airport (IAD).[2]

Rob

[1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pmtpa

[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Eqiad