[this interview is available online at https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Gavin ]
The "Inside Infra" series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team continues
with Gavin McDonald, who shares his experience with Sally Khudairi, ASF VP
Marketing & Publicity.
- - -
"...The Foundation itself has a responsibility to the Projects to ensure that
there is solid infrastructure there. So there's got to be a requirement that
there's people there all the time to maintain this infrastructure. The
Infrastructure team has become more professional over the years. The Projects
have become customers, I guess. Volunteers are always welcome; at Infra we
still have plenty of areas in which volunteers can help out."
- - -
- All right, let's get started. What is your name and how is it pronounced?
Nice and easy one. Gavin McDonald. Just McDonald as in Big Mac and fries
McDonald's. It's M and C, no Mac.
- When and how did you get involved with the ASF?
That was back around about 2005. I was looking for something different to do
than what I was doing. And I came across the Apache Forrest Project. I knew a
little bit about XML and websites and stuff like that. So I started
contributing to the Apache Forrest Project. And some months later they made me
a Committer.
- So you first got involved with the Forrest project, then at some point you
became part of infra. How did that evolution happen?
That's me looking around for more things to do. I've always been involved in
and interested in system administration work. My first real communications with
the Infra team was whilst working on a Forrest Solaris Zone and needed some
help with it. Shortly after that I started volunteering there.
First of all, I saw a huge number of tickets regarding mirrors, you know for
our software downloads. I'd say it was probably around 150 tickets outstanding
for mirrors wanting to join.
- ... What?!
Yeah.
- ... One Hundred and Fifty...
Something like that; some of them had been outstanding for quite a while. At
the time there was only one person being paid. There were volunteers obviously
looking after the machines and stuff like that. Mirrors were sort of lagging
behind as they were less important. So that was my in. I started off with
getting karma to add all the mirrors.
There was a certain standard that mirrors have to have, certain configurations.
So I was going backwards and forwards with the mirror providers and making sure
they were up to scratch, then adding them into our configuration.
>From then, I introduced BuildBot to Infrastructure. And I think maybe a year
>after that, this is now talking 2009, a position opened. I think more or less
>the rest of the Infrastructure volunteers said, "Gavin is doing the job
>anyway. Let's give it to him."
That was my interview.
Around October, November 2009 I became paid staff.
- Are you the longest serving member of the current Infra team?
Yes. Last year at ApacheCon I got presented with a 10 year t-shirt. Next time
there's a physical conference I'll be bringing it along.
- 10 years thumbs up: that's good! Explain the structure of the Infra team and
your role in it.
There are six of us, plus Greg (Stein), our Infra Admin, and David (Nalley), VP
Infra. One of them is a documentation guy, that's Andrew (Wetmore). The rest of
us all various system administration devops work. We look through tickets,
what's needed to be done, and obviously we're looking to improve our
infrastructure uptime and software and updates. So we all do what's needed,
basically. Everyone has various roles.
- What's your role?
Well it's a bit of everything, I think. I have been concentrating quite a lot
on the CI/CD side of things. That was written into my original contract, which
is now not part of the contract. Basically that means the whole entire time
I've been here, I've been involved in BuildBot and Jenkins and other CI/CD
stuff, and I've been doing a lot of that lately as well. Migrating Jenkins over
to new Cloudbees software, and on a whole load of VMs, mainly in AWS.
- You mention that CI/CD is a key part of your role. Is that what you're
specifically responsible for within Infra? Are you "the CI guy"? Are there
other things you do? Everyone says to me, "Hey we do everything." That sounds
amazing, but how is that possible? Do you do everything else in addition to the
CI work?
Yeah pretty much. Yeah. Everyone can do pretty much everything that we touch
on. Some just choose to do certain things that they're more capable of or more
used to working with or they like it better. Nobody is told, "You're working on
this."
- That's interesting. Fill that part in: if there's six things that need to
get done, but five of you are actually hands-on sysadmins, so you guys do what
you like to do or what you prefer to do? No one says, "Okay you go handle that
mail server"? How does it work?
Obviously there's 24 hours in a day and there's people all ar
