*TL;DR*: As part of the annual plan, we are moving Wikimedia Services to be run in an orchestrated platform driven by a new build pipeline (yes, that means containers). All new services for Wikimedia production must now start using this platform. By the end of June 2019, we will have started converting most remaining services. If you're responsible for an existing or new service, please talk to us.
Some Wikimedia functionality is provided by services which operate alongside MediaWiki, complimenting or supporting important features for users. They currently mostly run directly on the "bare metal" shared service clusters. The Deployment Pipeline "TEC3" annual plan[0] involves modernising production platforms, and we have a goal to move all of these to the new platform we've been building.
There are many benefits of changing to use this platform:
* Adding/removing capacity is easy as easy as a deployment; consequently, overall our clusters will be more scalable, and used more efficiently; * Rolling deployments are the default, reducing disruption and increasing dependability for readers, editors, and other end-users of our services; * Deployments are automatically versioned, rather than relying on a manual process from deployers; * There is increased testing before the deployment, by means of a staging cluster; and * Developers no longer need to create and use deploy repos manually, the pipeline does this.
If you are an owner, developer, or deployer of a current or forthcoming Wikimedia production service, we need to hear from you.
Some services have already moved to this new platform, and others are moving to it.[1] We are building and improving the features as we discover needs, so while we are confident now that services can run on this platform run reliably, we still lack comprehensive documentation for this platform. We are already in the process of creating it but we would like your input to make sure that we are supporting all our stakeholders.
Please peruse the page about the deployment pipeline on wikitech[2] and poke around. What documentation do you actually want? How can we make your work simpler and more straight-forward? Please file a task in Phabricator[3] or comment on the talk page.[4]
[0] - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technology/Annual_Plans/FY2019/TEC3... [1] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198901 [2] - https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployment_pipeline [3] - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/2453/ [4] - https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Deployment_pipeline
Deployment Pipeline team