Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/CI Futures WG/Meetings/2019-02-28

WMF working group for the future of CI

Context: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG

Meeting 2019-02-28

On Google Hangouts Meet.

• Brennen
• Lars
• Zeljko

Agenda

The goal of this meeting is to review the requirements list and outline a blog post announcing the WG to the world.

Actions from previous meeting:

• Done: Lars to check with Greg how much time we should spend on this
  • Lars, Zeljko: primary task
  • Brennen: 50%
• TODO: Lars to make a weekly blog post with updates of the WG work, for publicity, and to ask for feedback
• TODO: All: Ask for suggestions within our personal networks (linking to blog, when it's published)
• Done: Lars to set up a new meeting for Thursday. One hour before the Docker-SIG meeting.
• Done: Lars to create a Super Hard Requirements section
  • Thanks, Zeljko
• Done: Lars to move list to subpage or its own page

Notes

• Lars checked with Greg. We will assume Gerrit and Phabricator stay, for now, but should keep an eye open for being able to change them in the future, if we (WMF) decide we want to, so let's not assume those two are hardcoded forever.

• Possible outline of blog post
  • Summary of charter
    • current system is reaching its useful end of life, Zuul 2.5 fork is not sustainable
    • this presents an opportunity to improve developer experience and productivity
    • consider possible future tools for CI/CD to possibly replace or improve current stack, and make recommendation on how to change the stack in the future
    • deadline March 26
  • Context: we want to introduce a more CDep approach, deploy software to run in Kubernetes containers, and make the movement in general have a better time improve the software that runs our sites
    • this is a big change from status quo
    • for now, we're keeping Gerrit and Phabricator and concentrating on getting changed automatically tested and deployed (after review) to production as smoothly and quicky as possible
  • Summary of plan of work
    • gather initial rough list of requirement and list of candidate software
    • winnow candidate list down to those that have any chance of being considered seriously
    • evaluate candidates
    • write short report of evaluation results and recommendation of what to do next
  • Link to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG
  • Ask for feedback on requirements, candidates, via email or IRC or the above wiki page's talk page

• Where should blog post be done? How?
  • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/post/view/148/choosing_tools_for_continuous_integration/

• Discuss current list of requirements and candidates.
  • what are our very hard requirements? we need this to quickly decide if a candidate is worth evaluating in detail
  • Z: Requirements list potentially a good use for voting.

• This week also start collecting list of possible candidates.
  • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG/Candidates

• Evaluation method for serious candidates
  • Implement a toy CI project that builds and runs unit tests for Blubber
  • No deployment, too much hassle
  • Two people per candidate, working together?

• When do we start evaluating? Monday?

Actions

• TODO: Lars to ask Dan if he wants to join the WG as well.
• TODO: Lars to give a short presentation/demo of Ick to the WG and anyone else interested.
• TODO: Lars+Zeljko to set up Phabricator subtasks for what to do next for WG