[Labs-announce] Wikimedia Cloud Services: new team, new name, renewed focus

[Victoria Coleman]

Hello everyone, 

Starting in April 2017, we will be taking a number of projects related to services we are offering "in the cloud" and creating a new team, Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS), to support a more unified approach to these efforts. The sub-teams currently managing these efforts - the Labs sub-team within the Wikimedia Technical Operations team and the Tool Labs support sub-team from the Community Tech team - will be merged to form this new team.

Wikimedia Cloud Services will be a new team in the Technology Department of the Wikimedia Foundation reporting to Victoria  as the Foundation's Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This team is being formed based on a proposal made by the members of the Labs sub-team and the Tool Labs support sub-team.

The new team will be managed by Bryan Davis, who previously managed the Reading Infrastructure and Community Tech teams before helping found the Tool Labs support team in 2016. Chase Pettet, formerly manager of the Labs team, is taking on the new role of Lead Operations Engineer. Andrew Bogott, Yuvaraj Pandian, and Madhumitha Viswanathan are transferring in their existing roles from the former Labs team.

The WMCS team will maintain and extend the existing Wikimedia Labs infrastructure as a service platform, the Tool Labs platform as a service  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service> project, and many additional supporting technologies used in the cloud environment. The new team is excited to continue supporting developers who create innovative solutions to further the free knowledge movement, and will continue to partner with the larger Wikimedia volunteer community to manage the physical and virtual resources that power the environment and provide technical support to volunteer developers and other Wikimedia Cloud Services users.

This new team will focus on three areas of ongoing support and improvement:

Providing a stable and efficient hosting platform
Creating and maintaining services that empower the creation and operation of tools
Delivering technical and community support for users of the products

This new team will soon begin working on rebranding efforts intended to reduce confusion about the products they maintain.   <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Labs_labs_labs> This refocus and re-branding will take time to execute, but the team is looking forward to the challenge.

Stay tuned for more announcements, and as always Community members are encouraged to participate on labs-l at lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:labs-l at lists.wikimedia.org>,  <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/832/>Phabricator  and the #wikimedia-labs IRC channel.

Thank you,

Victoria & Wes
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