[Labs-l] Hello, and the short term plans

[Marc A. Pelletier]

<futurama>Good news, everyone!</futurama>

As many of you know, I officially started my duties today as the WMF 
Operations Engineer attached to the Tool Labs.  I intend to make a point 
of informing all of you of recent news, what I'm working on, and where 
I'm headed at regular intervals (probably weekly).

First, a bit of news:  I have had confirmation this weekend that the DB 
replication made available to Tool Labs users will, in fact, allow the 
creation of databases alongside the project ones.  This means that one 
of the use cases that seemed the most troublesome in the transition 
(joins between the WMF databases and tool-specific ones) will be fully 
supported.

We are making good strides in documenting the *impressive* inventory of 
tools that run on toolserver and their requirements (thanks, Silke!).  
The list-in-progress can be found at [1].  If you see missing or 
incorrect information, please feel free to adjust it -- the more 
precisely we know the requirements, the faster we can see about meeting 
them.

I've started documenting my preleminary design for the shiny new Tool 
Labs infrastructure at [2].  This is a living document, and will see a 
great deal of revision before it's over (and will serve as the seed for 
the documentation).  I will shortly create a new Labs project where that 
architecture is deployed in preproduction so we can shake out the 
kinks.  The existing projects, "bots" and "webtools" will be left active 
for the forseeable future until (a) the new architecture has proven 
itself and (b) every user has sucessfuly moved their tools to it.

I'm planning on having the new project be fully operational for new 
tools by the time the Amsterdam Hackathon takes place at the end of May 
at the very least.

For the next week, I'll be mostly in information-gathering mode, as well 
as refining the design and requirements of the Tool Labs.  Feel free to 
poke me for information (or /with/ information) by email or on IRC 
(where I am user 'Coren' and idle on #wikimedia-labs and 
#wikimedia-toolserve at the very least)

-- Marc A. Pelletier

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Toolserver/List_of_Tools
[2] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs/Tool_Labs/Design