Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Local Dev Sync/2019-10-24

Agenda

Go over techconf presentation skeleton - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZuQGkzXylvJnPSmP4epKjsS7TghXvK99AwXTHdNng4c/edit?usp=sharing

Discussion

TODO: We want the core session scheduled before the complex env session

existing work vagrant tries to be push button but when it breaks it is too hard to debug we created a thing that tries to be best of both worlds but also becomes complex seems like docker-dev has similar issues with complexity but has many users

framing:

https://xkcd.com/927/ needs to be on a slide
lack of standards for development
we don't have a good (unified?) story for new developers

[summary of existing work here]

conclusions from local-charts work & evaluation of previous stuff:

there are too many types of developers to serve easily in one framework
**can't just have one environment**
- We're not saying that we should have vagrant, mw-docker-dev, local-charts in parallel forever - we just want to be able to offer
minikube isn't that great
what is the definition of production-like that is good for us?
it would be good to be able to leverage cloud resources
- because your laptop sucks
- especially for sufficiently production-like use cases
- because you want to be able to share live environments
- because we could use shared resources (i.e. a database)
- **available**, not **required**

Open Questions (Mediawiki Core):

Who should be served by the mediawiki core dev environment?
What are the most important requirements for mediawiki core developers?
What services are required for MediaWiki core development?
Should we continue with k8s, docker-dev, or vagrant?

Open Questions (complex ):

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T235372

"Is it feasible to try to create and maintain an environment on developers' computers for complex multi-service MediaWiki development? What options do we have and how can they be improved?"

Session 1:

want to offer something simple tailored to a certain use-case

Session 2:

many services making up mw
lobby for cloud resources