As part of the Machine Learning Modernization Project (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/Modernization), the Machine Learning team has deployed a Wikimedia’s new machine learning inference infrastructure, called Lift Wing (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/LiftWing). Lift Wing brings a lot of new features such as support for GPU-based models, open source LLM hosting, auto-scaling, stability, and ability to host a larger number of models.

With the creation of Lift Wing, the team is turning its attention to deprecating the current machine learning infrastructure, ORES. ORES served us really well over the years, it was a successful project but it came before radical changes in technology like Docker, Kubernetes and more recently MLOps. The servers that run ORES are at the end of their planned lifespan and so to save cost we are going to shut them down in early 2024.

We have outlined a deprecation path on Wikitech (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/ORES), please read the page if you are a maintainer of a tool or code that uses the ORES endpoint https://ores.wikimedia.org/). If you have any doubt or if you need assistance in migrating to Lift Wing, feel free to contact the ML team via:

- Email: ml@wikimedia.org
- Phabricator: #Machine-Learning-Team tag
- IRC (Libera): #wikimedia-ml

The Machine Learning team is available to help projects migrate, from offering advice to making code commits. We want to make this as easy as possible for folks.

High Level timeline:

*By September 30th 2023: Infrastructure powering the ORES API endpoint will be migrated from ORES to Lift Wing. For users, the API endpoint will remain the same, and most users won’t notice any change. Rather just the backend services powering the endpoint will change.

Details: We'd like to add a DNS CNAME that points ores.wikimedia.org to ores-legacy.wikimedia.org, a new endpoint that offers a almost complete replacement of the ORES API calling Lift Wing behind the scenes. In an ideal world we'd migrate all tools to Lift Wing before decommissioning the infrastructure behind ores.wikimedia.org, but it turned out to be really challenging so to avoid disrupting users we chose to implement a transition layer/API.

To summarize, if you don't have time to migrate before September to Lift Wing, your code/tool should work just fine on ores-legacy.wikimedia.org and you'll not have to change a line in your code thanks to the DNS CNAME. The ores-legacy endpoint is not a 100% replacement for ores, we removed some very old and not used features, so we highly recommend at least test the new endpoint for your use case to avoid surprises when we'll make the switch. In case you find anything weird, please report it to us using the aforementioned channels.

*September to January: We will be reaching out to every user of ORES we can identify and working with them to make the migration process as easy as possible.

*By January 2024: If all goes well, we would like zero traffic on the ORES API endpoint so we can turn off the ores-legacy API.

If you want more information about Lift Wing, please check https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Machine_Learning/LiftWing

Thanks in advance for the patience and the help!

Regards,

The Machine Learning Team