Greetings,

As you may have read in our recent engineering reports, the Wikimedia Foundation's engineering team is concluding its transition from NFS to Swift as the default media storage system for all media files.

[Technical details: Files are currently uploaded to both Swift and NFS, and read from NFS. Starting on Thursday (if all goes according to plan), files will be read from Swift instead. This change notably includes Apache configuration changes.]

This consists mostly of behind-the-scenes work on the set of servers that host all images, videos, sounds and other media files on Wikimedia sites (more details below)

If all goes well, this change should be transparent to all users. However, in the event of a problem, it is likely that you'll notice the issue.

Please let your local communities know about the change so that they're not surprised if they encounter issues.

Please also help us consolidate reports of persistent issues: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SwiftMedia/Issues

As a sidenote, I'd like to encourage you to take a look at this new initiative to recruit more tech ambassadors: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadors

I'd love to get your feedback (ideally on the talk page) about the proposal, and how to make it better.

Thanks,