Hi all, let me weigh in with a few initial comments, and I'll ask the Labs folks to participate here and on Meta as well with regard to technical questions.
The initial focus for Labs has been to provide functionality that toolserver doesn't - get root on a VM or set of VMs to install/test arbitrary software/services, and get it ready for production deployment. Labs doesn't have DB replication yet, and it doesn't yet have an environment optimized for the development of small tools that are not geared towards deployment in production. There are some communities within Labs, most notably bots.wmflabs.org, that have started to optimize their environment for certain categories of tools (in this case bots). The second phase of Wikimedia Labs is called "Tool Labs" and its explicit goal is to be an alternative to the toolserver. This is outlined here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals#Milestones_by_quarter_2 and here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs#Tool_Labs In other words, it's not suprising that Labs cannot yet function as an effective toolserver alternative for most purposes, because we've not started work on the required functionality yet. Our timeline is to do so beginning in Q1 of the next calendar year. With regard to DB replication in particular, we're investigating whether we can accelerate the schedule since it's so highly requested. It is definitely the goal of ''Tool Labs'' to support the kind of small-scale, non-deployed tools that toolserver authors love to create. Petr Bena, a Labs user, has created this page, which would definitely benefit from more participation as well: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs/Toolserver_features_wanted_in_Tool_Labs It is true that we (WMF) have generally asked chapters to reduce investment in core infrastructure/services, and specifically asked WM-DE to work with us in transitioning from toolserver to Labs. There are a number of reasons for this: 1) WMF is a technology organization. Hosting the core infrastructure for Wikimedia projects is very much what we do. This includes data center operation, monitoring and backups, software deployments, software/service upgrades, code versioning infrastructure, bug tracking infrastructure, additional support systems and services (like this mailing list), etc. Toolserver is in fact hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation today, in our Amsterdam data-center. We provide space, power and racks for the toolserver cluster, at a cost of about $65,000/year to WMF according to our Director of TechOps. We also maintain the database replication on our end which enables tools to function. We can't provide the same level of service for the toolserver infrastructure as we do for core operations, and it makes no sense for a chapter to build out the required staffing and expertise to do so (set up/maintain all or some of the aforementioned functions). Even with slightly increased investment, toolserver would always suffer from being second or third tier infrastructure. 2) We're not comfortable hosting the toolserver infrastructure as-is. There are too many idiosyncratic aspects of its configuration; it has its own wiki, its own (closed source) version control system, its own (closed source) issue tracker. There are hacks like TUSC that we want to replace with better systems/services (e.g. OpenID/OAuth). So, what's next? Chapters are autonomous organizations, and it's WM-DE's call how much / whether it wants to continue to invest in infrastructure of any kind (and the decision of funding bodies like the FDC to accept or reject that proposition). However, for our part, we will not continue to support the current arrangement (DB replication, hosting in our data-center, etc.) indefinitely. The timeline we've discussed with Wikimedia Germany is roughly as follows: - Wind down new account creation on toolserver by Q2 of 2013 calendar year - Decommission toolserver by December 2013 WMF can't commit to providing technical support for tool transition (there are too many tools), so if there's any area where I think it would make sense to ramp up investments on WM-DE's part, it's in engineering capacity to support tool developers in porting tools to Labs. That said, there may be a need for emergency purchases/investments to keep TS in a usable state until December 2013 (and perhaps allow for some buffer room beyond that). That's not our call to make. Hope this clears up some questions around what's going on, and happy to answer further questions. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list (Toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org) https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l Posting guidelines for this list: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
