Hello, all!

Starting today we are kicking off the process to shut down Grid Engine and we want to share the timeline with you.

== Background ==

WMCS made the Grid Engine available as a backend engine for hosting tools on Toolforge - our Platform as a Service(PaaS) offering.

An additional backend engine, Kubernetes, was also made available on Toolforge.

Over time, maintaining and securing the grid has proven to be difficult and making it harder to provide support to the community in other ways because a lot of man-hours of maintenance work is spent on this. 

This is mainly due to the fact that there has been no new Grid Engine releases (bug fixes, security patches, or otherwise) since 2016.[0] 

Maintenance work on the grid continued because it was widely popular with the community and the Kubernetes offering didn't yet have many grid-like features that contributors came to love.

Once the Kubernetes platform could handle many of the workloads, we started the grid deprecation process by asking maintainers to migrate off the grid.[1]

Over the past year, we've been reaching out to our tool maintainers and working with them to migrate their tools off the Grid to Kubernetes.
We have reached out directly to all maintainers with their phabricator ticket IDs.

The latest updates to Build Service[2] have addressed many of the issues that prevented tool maintainers from migrating.

== Initial Timeline ==

The detailed grid shutdown timeline is available on wiki.[3] The important dates have been copied below. 

* 14th December, 2023: Any maintainer who has not responded on phabricator will have tools shutdown and crontabs commented out. Please plan to migrate or tell us your plans on phabricator before that date. 

* 14th February, 2024: The grid is completely shut down. All tools are stopped.

If you need further clarification or help migrating your tool, don't hesitate to reach out to us on IRC, Telegram, Phabricator[4] or via any of our support channels.[5] 

Thank you.

[0]: https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/14/toolforge-and-grid-engine/

[1]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation

[2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Build_Service

[3]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Grid_Engine_deprecation#Timeline

[4]: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/6135/

[5]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge/About_Toolforge#Communication_and_support