Ottomata added a comment.

Hi all, I talked to @gwicke a little bit more about this last Thursday.  He 
impressed upon me a couple of good points I hadn't fully taken in before, and I 
want to recognize them.

**Simplicity ** - Services is concerned that the REST service needs to be very 
reliable and not buggy.  restevent is simple, and if it never needs to do 
anything beyond this MVP, it will not need many changes or deploys throughout 
its lifetime.  Conversely, EventLogging is a codebase that is often worked on 
and improved.  Using this established and more featureful codebase provides a 
lot of benefit, but brings with it risk of instability due to changes.

**EventLogging deprecation** - A big concern expressed at the RFC was 
proliferations of systems and the effort needed to port old systems over to 
EventBus if we were to use restevent.  EventBus is about 2 things: 
standardizing WMF events, and getting valid events into a pub/sub for many 
consumers to use.  The scope of this MVP does not include consumption of 
events, and much of the EventLogging codebase is about consuming, not 
producing.  Using restevent does not mean that EventLogging will be deprecated. 
 EventLogging does much more than restevent ever would.  There will be other 
systems that will need to be ported to EventBus, but this is true independent 
of the EventLogging vs restevent discussion.

That said, I still think we should move forward with EventLogging as we have 
been and as the general consensus in the RFC indicated.  I have discussed these 
points with some folks, and even though they are valid concerns, I don't think 
that they outweigh the pros of using and improving an established working 
system.  The risk of instability due to active development of EventLogging can 
be addressed with common release management practices. I.e. we can version well 
and deploy only stable releases to the HTTP service.  And even though we 
wouldn't need to port EventLogging to use restevent, there is duplication of 
effort here, as EventLogging is built to do most of what this MVP is about.

Also, I'd like to note that building an HTTP produce service that fits this MVP 
in EventLogging //is// more work than is in restevent.  This is mostly due to 
the schema constraints (I.e. EventCapsule 
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schema:EventCapsule>) that EventLogging was 
originally built with.  The work we are doing to make EventLogging work with 
more generic meta data is valuable beyond just this MVP, so I think it is worth 
it.

> To be explicit: I'm not saying we're dismissing the RFC discussions and don't 
> want to collaborate with others. Our ultimate goal is exactly what you 
> described - a unified event bus system for the whole organisation - and only 
> an org-wide consensus will bring us home. But we have to make (small-ish) 
> compromises in the short term in order to meet our QG.


I think this is one of the sources of conflict. I originally proposed a very 
generic solution to an org wide problem, and Analytics has committed to work on 
the initial infrastructure MVP that solves the generic problem this quarter.  
Services wants to use the solution that solves the org wide problem, but has 
additionally committed to an additional goal that depends on the generic 
solution.  Services wants something that works for them now, and will make it 
work for others later.  Analytics is interested in the more generic problems 
first.

Services goal + the fact that EventLogging is more work is worrysome for 
Services.  I believe that we can get EventLogging ready in time to meet 
Service's needs, but I'm not excited about promising it.  As a back up and with 
Ops' go-ahead, I think it would be ok to use restevent as a stand in until 
EventLogging is ready, especially for the month of December so that Services 
can continue to work on their goals.

@gwicke, @mobrovac, @eevans, and @nuria, I propose we set up a 
twice-a-week-EventBus-standup-sync-up-party-meeting to help us better 
collaborate and be in sync.   How about Monday and Thursdays?


TASK DETAIL
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114443

EMAIL PREFERENCES
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/

To: Ottomata
Cc: Milimetric, RobLa-WMF, brion, intracer, Smalyshev, mark, MZMcBride, 
Krinkle, EBernhardson, bd808, Joe, dr0ptp4kt, madhuvishy, Nuria, ori, faidon, 
aaron, GWicke, mobrovac, Eevans, Ottomata, Matanya, Aklapper, JAllemandou, 
jkroll, Hardikj, Wikidata-bugs, Jdouglas, aude, Deskana, Manybubbles, daniel, 
Mbch331, Jay8g, Ltrlg, jeremyb, Legoktm



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