Hi all!

In response to COVID-19, we are putting in place stricter guidelines around deployments with an emphasis on site reliability.

To support this change, we have the following guidelines for software development:

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While we are not going to go into full emergency or holiday mode (i.e., no releases), we do think it is necessary to de-risk the deployment train by adding some additional scrutiny into the process. Our ask is that you take extra precautions as outlined in our deployment guidelines below. Most importantly, if you know you have limited availability to support a deployment, don’t put your code on the train. When in doubt, ask.

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Please review the COVID-19 deployment guidelines at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/Covid-19 -

SWAT (emergency hot-fix) deploys will continue as is

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We are limiting the frequency of onsite data center work to help minimize the exposure of our team members who travel in and out of our data center facilities. This will result in the general delay of hardware installations and repairs, though we will continue being immediately available for emergencies associated with uptime and critical redundancies. We are still finalizing what this means and will provide additional guidance when we have it.

Please err on the side of caution with the changes you merge.

Considerations (from the wikitech page)

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Can you roll back this change without lasting impact? -

A recovery plan is required as this will help identify our capacity for recovering from the failure -

THIS IS A KEY QUESTION, if you can’t answer it, you shouldn’t deploy -

Is specialized knowledge required to support this change in production? -

Are there multiple people with this knowledge? -

Is there a way to increase confidence about the correctness of this change? -

Reviews (Design, Code, etc) -

Testing coverage (unit tests, integration tests) -

Manual testing (e.g. Beta, vagrant, docker)

We’re hosting office hours on Mondays at 17:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office where you can ask questions regarding what is a good choice vs not.

Thank you all in advance for your understanding and empathy over the next few weeks.

<3

-- Your Local (Internet) Neighborhood Release Engineers