[Labs-l] Announcement: Yuvi Panda joins Ops

[Mark Bergsma]

Hi all,

I'm very pleased to announce that as of this week, Yuvi Panda is part of
the Wikimedia Technical Operations team, to work on our Wikimedia Labs
infrastructure. Yuvi originally joined the Wikimedia Foundation Mobile team
in December 2011, where he has been lead development for the original
Wikipedia App and its rewrite, amongst many other projects.

Besides his work in Mobile, Yuvi has been volunteering for Ops work in
Wikimedia Labs for a long time now. One of the notable examples of his work
is a seamlessly integrated Web proxy system that allows public web requests
from the Internet to be proxied to Labs instances on private IPs without
requiring public IP addresses for each instance. This very user friendly
system, which he built on top of NGINX, LUA, redis, sqlite and the
OpenStack API, sees a lot of usage and has dramatically reduced the need
for Labs users to request (scarce) public IP address resources via a manual
approval process.

Another example of his work that has made a big difference is the
initiation of the Labs-Vagrant project; bringing the virtues of the
Mediawiki:Vagrant project to Wikimedia Labs, and allowing anyone to bring a
MediaWiki development environment up in Labs with great ease. More recently
Yuvi has been working on our much needed infrastructure in Labs for
monitoring metrics (Graphite) and service availability (Shinken). We expect
this will give us a lot more insight into the internals and availability of
software and services running in Wikimedia Labs and its many projects, and
we should be able to deploy it in Production as well.

Of course all of this work didn't go unnoticed, and about half a year ago
we've asked Yuvi if he was interested to move to Ops. With his extensive
development experience and his demonstrated ability to join this with solid
Ops work to create stable and highly useful solutions, we think he's a
great fit for this role.

Yuvi recently had his VISA application accepted, and is planning to move to
San Francisco in March 2015. Until then he will be working with us remotely
from India.

Please join me in congratulating Yuvi!

-- 
Lead Operations Architect
Director of Technical Operations
Wikimedia Foundation
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