[Cloud] Grid hosts

[Bryan Davis]

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 7:42 PM, John <phoenixoverride at gmail.com> wrote:
> Given that Trusty was released almost 4 years ago, is there any plans for
> getting a newer platform for grid users? This is partially in relation to
> T183090, there are some areas where the k8s just fail. What prospects are
> there for moving to a newer grid exec nodes? I would start to expect that we
> will be seeing more and more cases of software incompatibility or security
> issues arise as time passes, and that given the glacial speed at which such
> a move would take I am surprised we have not seen the first stages of a
> migration already in progress.

Ubuntu Trusty is a long term stable (LTS) release. Ubuntu will
continue to provide security patches for it until April 2019.

The Cloud Services team has been talking about what our migration path
will be from Trusty to a newer distribution. We do not have solid
plans yet, but the likely replacement will be either Debian Stretch
(to keep pace with the main production network) or a newer Ubuntu LTS
release (Xenial or Bionic). We will probably start a project around
April 2018 to determine the migration path and then begin providing
bastions and execution nodes using the new operating system to allow
Tool maintainers a reasonable time to transition as was done with the
Precise to Trusty migration
(<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tools_Precise_deprecation>).

We are also still hoping to invest more effort into improving
workflows and functionality for Kubernetes
(<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T136264>). Kubernetes will never
provide a direct one-to-one replacement for Grid Engine. At some point
however it should be possible to move most of the webservice type
tools to it. If things go according to plan we will be doing some
education and outreach soon to try and get more people to test their
webservices on Kubernetes and either move them over or help us
document the things that would need to change in order to make that
movement possible. Tasks like T183090 are definitely useful for this
effort.

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Manager, Cloud Services          Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855