[Labs-admin] Fwd: Re: Servers with GPUs

[Bryan Davis]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 1:47 PM, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thinking more about it, I think the bigger question is - is cloud
> going to be a service team or a product team? Not sure if that's
> standard terminology but...
>
> A service team is primarily driven by what other teams / groups of
> people want and we're technologically in a space to provide. The
> roadmap and priorities are driven by people external to the team.
> Workflow is often 'X people want Y, we are able to do Y, so let us do
> Y'.
>
> A product team on the other hand, has a more focused vision of what it
> wants to do that is intrinstic to the team. It might collaborate with
> others to achieve its goals, but priority setting comes from inside
> the team.
>
> When I was in the mobile team, we treated them like a service team
> ('us: hey do this for us!') while they thought of themselves as a
> product team ('them: this is what we want to do, not
> what-everyone-else-asks-of-us'). This caused a lot of issues. From
> talking to people, there is similar confusion about ops team as well -
> some teams think we are there to do things for them, which part of ops
> agree with and parts disagree with - causing problems...
>
> I'm sure someone else can talk about this far more eloquently than I
> :D But I think we should explicitly decide at some point...

>From my POV, Cloud Services a product team and our product is IaaS,
PaaS, and data services for Wikimedia technical products. I'm actually
pretty confident most would agree with me on that.

The fuzzy line/slippery slope is are we the people who go out of our
way to help Foundation teams acquire and deploy special purpose
hardware for prototyping possible production products or not. In my
mind this is what has brought up this GPU topic and other co-located
hardware/bare metal discussions before. I personally don't think this
should be a role we fill in the organization.

I'm all for adding more capacity to accommodate projects that need
really big VMs or more locally attached storage if those dedicated
resources can be justified in the combined budget *and* the resources
can be put to good use by the general Cloud user community when the
project fails or graduates to production. I'm not excited about adding
something that is not long term generally useful. GPUs seem like
something that could much more easily be re-purposed in the analytics
cluster than in our OpenStack product.

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