Platonides wrote:
On 25/09/12 20:48, Erik Moeller wrote:
- WMF is a technology organization. Hosting the core infrastructure
for Wikimedia projects is very much what we do. This includes data center operation, monitoring and backups, software deployments, software/service upgrades, code versioning infrastructure, bug tracking infrastructure, additional support systems and services (like this mailing list), etc.
Toolserver is in fact hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation today, in our Amsterdam data-center. We provide space, power and racks for the toolserver cluster, at a cost of about $65,000/year to WMF according to our Director of TechOps.
Something we should all be grateful for.
I think the current Toolserver setup is less than ideal and I think the future proposed setup (Tool Labs) is even worse. Right now there's already a heavy reliance on the goodwill of the Wikimedia Foundation to keep the Toolserver running. Without database replication, the Toolserver is just mediocre shared hosting.
Going forward, the situation will worsen, as the Wikimedia Foundation is basically creating a walled garden. We're watching as the Wikimedia Foundation puts all of the data, tools, and infrastructure behind the same organization and then will be able to determine who does and does not have access to this and under what terms, a step backward as far as I'm concerned.
Redundancy and duplication in this case is a very good thing, not a bad thing. If we had ten Toolservers (hosted by Wikimedia chapters, Amazon, LeaseWeb, or anyone else), it wouldn't be such an issue when database replication stopped on one of them. It might not be as efficient, but it'd be a much safer long-term strategy, rather than putting all of the high-speed access to data (and in some cases, the _only_ access to data [watchlist, anonymized user preferences, etc.]) behind the Wikimedia Foundation's control.
MZMcBride