As of 2024-03-14T11:02 UTC the Toolforge Grid Engine service has been shutdown.[0][1]
This shutdown is the culmination of a final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes that started in in late 2022.[2] Arturo wrote a blog post in 2022 that gives a detailed explanation of why we chose to take on the final shutdown project at that time.[3] The roots of this change go back much further however to at least August of 2015 when Yuvi Panda posted to the labs-l list about looking for more modern alternatives to the Grid Engine platform.[4]
Some tools have been lost and a few technical volunteers have been upset as many of us have striven to meet a vision of a more secure, performant, and maintainable platform for running the many critical tools hosted by the Toolforge project. I am deeply sorry to each of you who have been frustrated by this change, but today I stand to celebrate the collective work and accomplishment of the many humans who have helped imagine, design, implement, test, document, maintain, and use the Kubernetes deployment and support systems in Toolforge.
Thank you to the past and present members of the Wikimedia Cloud Services team. Thank you to the past and present technical volunteers acting as Toolforge admins. Thank you to the many, many Toolforge tool maintainers who use the platform, ask for new capabilities, and help each other make ever better software for the Wikimedia movement. Thank you to the folks who who will keep moving the Toolforge project and other technical spaces in the Wikimedia movement forward for many, many years to come.
[0]: https://sal.toolforge.org/log/DrOgPI4BGiVuUzOd9I1b [1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Obsolete:Toolforge/Grid [2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation#T... [3]: https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/14/toolforge-and-grid-engine/ [4]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/labs-l/2015-August/003955.html
Bryan, on behalf of the Toolforge administrators