[Wikitech-l] TechCom Radar 2018-09-12

[Kate Chapman]

Hi All,

Here are the minutes from this week's TechCom meeting:

* Hosted IRC discussion on:  RfC: Create a proper command-line runner
for MediaWiki maintenance tasks https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99268
this RFC proposes to create an organized structure and runner for
running of maintenance tasks.
 * Minutes:

 * Log:


* Discussed: Replace docs/design.txt with a reasonably complete summary
of mw:Architectural_guidelines
 and plan to copy the doc to
a wiki from the repo

* On Last Call Ending 26 September 2pm PST(21:00 UTC, 23:00 CET):
Harmonise the identification of requests across our stack


* RFC Approved: Add support for Content-Security-Policy (CSP) headers in
MediaWiki  The initial phase
of this RFC had been previously approved and another RFC has been
requested related to a registry to opt-in and connect to 3rd party services.

* Discussed new draft of the MediaWiki Platform Architecture Principles:
 * New draft:

 * Previous draft:


* No IRC meeting next week

* Noted: Datacenter switch occurred this week

You can also find our meeting minutes at


See also the TechCom RFC board
.

If you prefer you can subscribe to our newsletter here:


Thanks,

Kate
-- 
Kate Chapman TechCom Facilitator (Contractor)





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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wmfall] Datacenter Switchover recap

[Mukunda Modell]

This is great!

Thank you to everyone involved, for the really important work that you are
all doing, and thanks to Alexandros, Timo & Giuseppe for sharing the
highlights. It's great to know that so many pieces can come together in
just 8 minutes. This really is an impressive (and important!)
accomplishment. You've set the bar so high that it'll be a real challenge*
to do it any better next year!

* A challenge which I have no doubt will lead to many more improvements to
the infrastructure between now and the next DC-switchover.

On Fri, Sep 14, 2018 at 2:18 AM Giuseppe Lavagetto 
wrote:

> Sorry for the copy/paste fail, I meant
>
>
>
>> So I want to congratulate everyone who was involved in the process, that
>> includes most of the people on the core platform, performance, search and
>> SRE teams, but a special personal thanks goes to
>> Alexandros and Riccardo for driving most of the process and allowing me
>> to care about the switchover for less than a week before it happened and,
>> yes, to take the time to fix that bug too :)
>>
>>
> Cheers,
>
> Giuseppe
> --
> Giuseppe Lavagetto
> Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
> ___
> Wmfall mailing list
> wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall
>
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[Wikitech-l] Patchsets by new Gerrit contributors waiting for code review and/or merge

[Andre Klapper]

CR0: Please review and provide guidance if you are familiar with the
code, and decide (CR±1 or CR±2):

* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/MyVariables/+/454427/
** Update to modern extension loading and reorganize and apply coding standards
** 2018-August-28
** Maintainers/Stewards: ?

* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/TemplateData/+/457072/
** Remove empty Default, Example and Auto value sections of the output table
** 2018-September-02
** Maintainers/Stewards: Contributors > Editing team


CR+1: Please help make a decision (CR±1, CR±2) on these CR+1 patches:

* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase/+/453821/
** Add monolingual language code hbo
** 2018-August-27
** Maintainers/Stewards: WMDE Engineering


Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Code_review#By_project how
you can get notified of new patches in your code areas of interest.

Thanks in advance for your reviews!


Of last time's 4 listed patch, 1 changed to CR-1 thanks to JForrester,
1 changed to CR+1 thanks to Foxtrott.


Maintainers/Stewards data taken from 
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers
CR0 source: 
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/ownerin:newcomers+status:open+label:Verified%253E%253D0+label:Code-Review%253D0
CR+1 source: 
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/ownerin:newcomers+status:open+label:Verified%253E%253D1+label:Code-Review%253E%253D%252B1+-label:Code-Review%253C%253D0

-- 
Andre Klapper  |  ak...@gmx.net
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/



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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wmfall] Datacenter Switchover recap

[Giuseppe Lavagetto]

Sorry for the copy/paste fail, I meant



> So I want to congratulate everyone who was involved in the process, that
> includes most of the people on the core platform, performance, search and
> SRE teams, but a special personal thanks goes to
> Alexandros and Riccardo for driving most of the process and allowing me to
> care about the switchover for less than a week before it happened and, yes,
> to take the time to fix that bug too :)
>
>
Cheers,

Giuseppe
-- 
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wmfall] Datacenter Switchover recap

[Giuseppe Lavagetto]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 7:49 AM Bryan Davis  wrote:

>
> Everyone involved worked hard to make this happen, but I'd like to
> give a special shout out to Giuseppe Lavagetto for taking the time to
> follow up on a VisualEditor problem that affected Wikitech
> (). We noticed during the
> April 2017 switchover that the client side code for VE was failing to
> communicate with the backend component while the wikis were being
> served from the Dallas datacenter. We guessed that this was a
> configuration error of some sort, but did not take the time to debug
> in depth. When the issue reoccurred during the current datacenter
> switch, Giuseppe took a deep dive into the code and configuration,
> identified the configuration difference that triggered the problem,
> and made a patch for the Parsoid backend that fixes Wikitech.
>
>
While I'm flattered by the compliments, I think it's fair to underline the
problem was partly caused by a patch I made to Parsoid some time ago. So I
mostly cleaned up a problem I caused - does this count for getting a new
t-shirt, even if I fixed it with more than one year of delay? :P

On the other hand, I want to join the choir praising the work that has been
done for the switchover, and take the time to list all the things we've
done collectively to make it as uneventful and fast (read-only time was
less than 8 minutes this time) as it was:
- Mediawiki now fetches its read-only state and which datacenter is the
master from etcd, eliminating the need for a code deployment
- We now connect to our per-datacenter distributed cache via mcrouter,
which allows us to keep the caches in various datacenters consistent. This
eliminated the need to wipe the cache during the read-only phase, thus
resulting in a big reduction in the time we went to read-only
- Our old jobqueue not only gave me innumerable debugging nightmares, but
was hard and tricky to handle in a multi-datacenter environment. We have
substituted it with a more modern system which needed no intervention
during the switchover
- Our media storage system (Swift + thumbor) is now active-active and we
write and read from both datacenters
- We created a framework for easily automate complex orchestration tasks
(like a switchover) called "spicerack", which will benefit our operations
in general and has the potential to reduce the toil on the SRE team, while
proven, automated procedures can be coded for most events.
- Last but not least, the Dallas datacenter (codenamed "codfw") needed
little to no tuning when we moved all traffic, and we had to fix virtually
nothing that went out of sync during the last 1.4 years. I know this might
sound unimpressive, but keeping a datacenter that's not really used in good
shape and in sync is a huge accomplishment in itself; I've never seen
before such a show of flawless execution and collective discipline.

So I want to congratulate everyone who was involved in the process, that
includes most of the people on the core platform, performance, search and
SRE teams, but a special personal thanks goes to
- The whole SRE team, and really anyone working on our production
environment, for keeping the Dallas datacenter in good shape for more than
a year, so that we didn't need to adjust almost anything pre or
post-switchover Alexandros and Riccardo for driving most of the process and
allowing me to care about the switchover for less than a week before it
happened and, yes, to take the time to fix that bug too :)

Cheers,

Giuseppe
P.S. I'm sure I forgot someone / something amazing we've done; I apologize
in advance.
-- 
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
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[Wikitech-l] Results from 2018 global Wikimedia survey are published!

[Edward Galvez]

Hi everyone,

I'm excited to share that our annual survey about Wikimedia communities is
now published!

This survey included 170 questions and reaches over 4,000 community
members across
four audiences: Contributors, Affiliate organizers, Program Organizers, and
Volunteer Developers. This survey helps us hear from the experience of
Wikimedians from across the movement so that teams are able to use
community feedback in their planning and their work. This survey also helps
us learn about long term changes in communities, such as community health
or demographics.

The report is available on meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_Insights/2018_Report

For this survey, we worked with 11 teams to develop the questions. Once the
results were analyzed, we spent time with each team to help them understand
their results. Most teams have already identified how they will use the
results to help improve their work to support you.

The report could be useful for your work in the Wikimedia movement as well!
What are you learning from the data? Take some time to read the report and
share your feedback on the talk pages. We have also published a blog that
you can read.[1]

We are hosting a livestream presentation[2] on September 20 at 1600 UTC.
Hope to see you there!

Feel free to email me directly with any questions.

All the best,
Edward


[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/09/13/what-we-learned-surveying-4000-community-members/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGQtWFP9Cjc


-- 
Edward Galvez
Evaluation Strategist, Surveys
Learning & Evaluation
Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation

-- 
Edward Galvez
Evaluation Strategist, Surveys
Learning & Evaluation
Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation
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