[QA] Proposal for Zurich Hackathon: Production-like Vagrant

[Yuvi Panda]

This sounds like a great idea! I built Labsvagrant a few months ago (
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Labs-vagrant) - lets you run your
vagrant setup on Labs directly. I also have a fair amount of commits in
both Vagrant and our Ops repo, so I'll be doubly interested in working on
this.

There are, however, difficulties.

1. The Vagrant puppet environment shares almost zero code with our
operations repo.
2. This means that we would have to either migrate the ops puppet code to
use the Vagrant puppet modules, or vice versa
3. (2) requires a lot of buy in, from Ops *and* Ori.

I think these will need to be addressed before we start on it. I am not so
sure that'll be simple.

The other way is to figure out what exactly are the differences between
Vagrant and Prod that cause issues when developing, and fix Vagrant to
match those in production more closely. This seems more achievable for the
hackathon.




On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Arthur Richards <arichards at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> I've talked a bit with a number of you over the last year or so about a
> dream I have of a Vagrant instance that replicates, as much as possible,
> our production environment (like betalabs, but your very own personal,
> portable, betalabs). Having something like this would be tremendously
> valuable. It would mean:
>
> * Getting a new developer up and running to start writing
> production-worthy code would be trivial (at least in terms of setting up a
> dev environment)
> ** This could be huge at hackathons and on-boarding new engineers
> * It would allow us all to test our code against a production-like
> environment WITHOUT needing to first merge code and then test on betalabs
> * It would eradicate (or come close to eradicating) the "oh, it worked on
> my machine, why doesn't it work on yours/betalabs/production/etc" scenario
> * It would get us closer to a unified environment for easier browser and
> unit testing (and perhaps in the future, integration/api testing)
> * And more!
>
> My intuition says this is doable, given that so much of production has
> been puppetized. What do you all think? Would you be interested in working
> on something like this at the Zurich Hackathon and/or beyond? It would
> likely require buy-in/support from someone from ops and platform as well,
> but I wanted to run it by you all before taking it further.
>
> --
> Arthur Richards
> Software Engineer, Mobile
> [[User:Awjrichards]]
> IRC: awjr
> +1-415-839-6885 x6687
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/attachments/20140123/ef3519c8/attachment.html>