<futurama>Good news, everyone!</futurama>
As many of you know, I officially started my duties today as the WMF
Operations Engineer attached to the Tool Labs. I intend to make a point
of informing all of you of recent news, what I'm working on, and where
I'm headed at regular intervals (probably weekly).
First, a bit of news: I have had confirmation this weekend that the DB
replication made available to Tool Labs users will, in fact, allow the
creation of databases alongside the project ones. This means that one
of the use cases that seemed the most troublesome in the transition
(joins between the WMF databases and tool-specific ones) will be fully
supported.
We are making good strides in documenting the *impressive* inventory of
tools that run on toolserver and their requirements (thanks, Silke!).
The list-in-progress can be found at [1]. If you see missing or
incorrect information, please feel free to adjust it -- the more
precisely we know the requirements, the faster we can see about meeting
them.
I've started documenting my preleminary design for the shiny new Tool
Labs infrastructure at [2]. This is a living document, and will see a
great deal of revision before it's over (and will serve as the seed for
the documentation). I will shortly create a new Labs project where that
architecture is deployed in preproduction so we can shake out the
kinks. The existing projects, "bots" and "webtools" will be left
active
for the forseeable future until (a) the new architecture has proven
itself and (b) every user has sucessfuly moved their tools to it.
I'm planning on having the new project be fully operational for new
tools by the time the Amsterdam Hackathon takes place at the end of May
at the very least.
For the next week, I'll be mostly in information-gathering mode, as well
as refining the design and requirements of the Tool Labs. Feel free to
poke me for information (or /with/ information) by email or on IRC
(where I am user 'Coren' and idle on #wikimedia-labs and
#wikimedia-toolserve at the very least)
-- Marc A. Pelletier
[1]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Toolserver/List_of_Tools
[2]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs/Tool_Labs/Design