[QA] Flagging some Beta Labs issues

[Bryan Davis]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 6:12 PM, Greg Grossmeier <greg at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Yep. From the team manager perspective. Antoine from the technical
> perspective (when he's back from paternity leave, Dan Duvall and Bryan and
> Reedy until then).
>
> --
> Sent from my phone, please excuse brevity.
>
> On Sep 5, 2014 4:08 PM, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> So did we ever decide who the official point person for Beta Labs issues
>> is? Greg?

I would recommend that in addition to (or as a way of) making Greg
aware of an emergent operational concern with beta labs you pop into
#wikimedia-qa on irc and let us all know what you are seeing. Consider
#-qa the beta equivalent of #wikimedia-operations in production.
Filing bugs in bugzilla under the "Wilimedia Labs" product and
"deployment-prep (beta)" component [0] is also a great thing to do to
follow up or to report concerning but not urgent issues.

Thanks to recent work by Yuvi and Daniel Zahn we now have much better
automated monitoring of the beta project (and labs in general) so
hopefully by the time you show up on irc the answer you hear will be
that we are already working to resolve the problem.

I would also highly encourage all teams who have come to depend on
beta running smoothly for thier day to day testing needs to have one
or two developers become familiar with the deployment-prep project and
willing to lend a hand when things get weird. I would be glad to offer
some of my copious free time (heh) to give some group tours of the
beta infrastructure via hangout as a means for spreading knowledge in
return for folks helping update stale documentation. Getting
comfortable in beta is a great gateway to helping out in production
and generally learning about a breadth of production WMF mechanics.

I would extend a similar offer to do paring/demos with teams who want
to setup their own controlled testing environments in a labs project.
The ease of use and functionality offered by the integration of
MediaWiki-Vagrant and Labs has come a long way in the last 6 months or
so. It is now possible to run a multiple wiki setup on a single host
in labs which provides fully functional CentralAuth services. In
return I'd only ask that new configuration which is needed to set
these environments up is contributed back to MediaWiki-Vagrant in the
form of puppet patches that can be shared with other staff and
volunteers and that gotchas are documented to help ease the learning
curve for the next team.


[0]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?component=deployment-prep%20%28beta%29&product=Wikimedia%20Labs

Bryan
-- 
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808 at wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855