<futurama>Good news, everyone!</futurama>

As many of you know, I officially started my duties today as the WMF Operations Engineer attached to the Tool Labs. I intend to make a point of informing all of you of recent news, what I'm working on, and where I'm headed at regular intervals (probably weekly).

First, a bit of news: I have had confirmation this weekend that the DB replication made available to Tool Labs users will, in fact, allow the creation of databases alongside the project ones. This means that one of the use cases that seemed the most troublesome in the transition (joins between the WMF databases and tool-specific ones) will be fully supported.

We are making good strides in documenting the *impressive* inventory of tools that run on toolserver and their requirements (thanks, Silke!). The list-in-progress can be found at [1]. If you see missing or incorrect information, please feel free to adjust it -- the more precisely we know the requirements, the faster we can see about meeting them.

I've started documenting my preleminary design for the shiny new Tool Labs infrastructure at [2]. This is a living document, and will see a great deal of revision before it's over (and will serve as the seed for the documentation). I will shortly create a new Labs project where that architecture is deployed in preproduction so we can shake out the kinks. The existing projects, "bots" and "webtools" will be left active for the forseeable future until (a) the new architecture has proven itself and (b) every user has sucessfuly moved their tools to it.

I'm planning on having the new project be fully operational for new tools by the time the Amsterdam Hackathon takes place at the end of May at the very least.

For the next week, I'll be mostly in information-gathering mode, as well as refining the design and requirements of the Tool Labs. Feel free to poke me for information (or /with/ information) by email or on IRC (where I am user 'Coren' and idle on #wikimedia-labs and #wikimedia-toolserve at the very least)

-- Marc A. Pelletier

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Toolserver/List_of_Tools [2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs/Tool_Labs/Design