Intro
Deployment-prep, also known as the beta cluster, is a Cloud VPS project originally created by the Platform team together with Ops (now SRE) as a final-stage test environment for new features. In the years since it has become a resource that is used by technical volunteers, the Wikimedia CI pipeline {{cn}}, Foundation staff, and manual testers. It is not however proactively maintained by any Foundation staff in their staff capacity.
This is a "weird" stewardship request because this project is not technically part of the Wikimedia production environment. It is also not exactly a single software system. Instead it is a shared environment used by multiple stakeholders to validate code and configuration changes in a non-production environment. A decision to sunset the beta cluster would be highly disruptive if it did not come along with a proposal to build a replacement environment of some type. This environment however has spent years in a state of uncertain maintainership and the code stewardship process seems like the most mature process we have to discuss the merits of the project and how it might be better supported/resourced going forward.
Issues
- Unclear ownership of the Cloud VPS project instances (meaning that there are a large number of project admins, but little to no documentation about which people are taking care of which instances)
- Production Puppet code is used, but often needs customization to work within the various constraints of the Cloud VPS project environment which requires special +2 rights. No holder of such rights is currently active in the project.
- Not all Wikimedia production software changes are deployed in this environment {{cn}}
- Puppet failures triggered by upstream configuration changes can remain for days or weeks before being addressed potentially blocking further testing of code and configuration changes