[Engineering] Choosing tools for continuous integration

[Lars Wirzenius]

The Release Engineering team has started a working group to discuss
and consider our future continuous integration tooling. Please help!

The RelEng team is working with SRE to build a continuous delivery and
deployment pipeline, as well as changing production to run things in
containers under Kubernetes. We aim to improve the process of making
changes to software behind our various sites by making it take less
effort, happen faster, be less risky, and as automated as possible.
The developers will have a better development experience, be more
empowered, and more productive.

Wikimedia has had a CI system for many years now, but is based on
versions of tools that are reaching the end of their useful life.
Those tools need to be upgraded, and this will probably require
further changes due to how the new versions function. This is a good
point to consider what tools and functionality we need and want.

The working group is tasked to consider the needs and wants, and
evaluate the available options, and make a recommendation of what to
use in the future. The deadline is March 25. The work is being
documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG
and we're currently collecting requirements and candidates to
evaluate.

We would welcome any feedback on those! Via IRC (#wikimedia-pipeline),
on the talk page of the working group's wiki page above, or as a
comment to the blog post below. Or as a reply to this email.

(Also at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/148/choosing_tools_for_continuous_integration/)