[Labs-l] Production status of labs (wsa Re: Reboot of virt11 Friday Sept 6 at 20:00 UTC)

[Platonides]

Ryan, you forget that tools are run by volunteers. Availability issues 
are at a completely different level.
Also you don't provide a howto to get into that mythical production 
level. One of the applications using that api *was* developed by WMF 
staff, it *had* a server in production (which if I remember right, was 
hard to get even though it was an “official” WMF task) which did a 
nightly copy from toolserver.
The server was gone shortly after WLM 2012, this year there's no support 
from WMF for the WLM app. It had to be revived by volunteer work.
Now you complain that labs isn't good enough. Well, it's amongst the 
best there was available. And we would be running it behind a modem line 
home connection if there was no other option left.

As for thinks that can/can't have downtime, better definitions are 
needed. Probably many bots can recover with no data loss from a downtime 
of a few minutes. In some cases there will be a processing loss 
proportional to the downtime. Also, there may be an upper bound for the 
downtime.

The web tools are much trickier, and at any proposed downtime timeframe 
there may be someone "needing" it to be up. At which point does that 
tool change into the «should be in production» category?