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

[Ryan Lane]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Platonides <platonides at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

To get something into production, adding a bugzilla ticket well in advance
of when it's needed is a good first step. This has always been the case and
Labs hasn't changed that.


> 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.
>
>
I understand that Labs is the best available spot to run this, but that
doesn't change the fact that Labs isn't designed for this. WLM is something
I'd consider production. I think it's a failure of WMF to not support it
properly. It wasn't properly supported last year and it's crazy it's not
properly supported this year.


> 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?
>
>
If a tool is critical to most of the wiki users or if it's used in a
massive campaign, it should have production level support. The TS does not
have what anyone could rightly consider production level support and Labs
doesn't either (though we have much higher support requirements than TS).
We have no intentions of ever having production level support for Labs.

- Ryan
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