A number of Cloud VPS project requests result in prolonged discussion about the scope and intent of the project and if those facts align with the spirit of the Cloud VPS service. The WMCS team has some guidelines in our collective heads, but they are not written down in a way that makes them easy to explain or for the larger community to provide feedback on.

Some of the potential guidelines to document:

• Single user "owned" projects are problematic from a fairness and inclusivity point of view. We can not supply such projects to all technical contributors simply due to scale and cost of equipment.
  • There are currently violations of this guideline within the WMCS team itself that should be examined.
• Foundation team focused projects are problematic for various reasons including the difficulty of determining who is responsible for a given VM and projects outlasting the teams that they were named for.
• Projects intending to limit membership need additional scrutiny. There are valid reasons that a project requires a limited pool of participants (sensitive data stored/transmitted, infrastructure for larger initiatives, etc), but broadly we prefer projects that are inclusive.
• Projects intended to build content wikis are generally not in scope, but there may be exceptions such as the Beta Cluster where the content is really a necessary side effect of testing at scale.
• Projects needing larger than default quota may require additional justification.
• Projects with a clear end of life date may be granted additional leniency.
• "Emergency" requests are very unlikely to be granted without the normal review process.

Current explanation is at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_VPS_project#Guidelines_for_project_requests