My apologies if this ticket comes as a surprise to you. In order to ensure WMCS can provide a stable, secure and supported platform, it’s important we migrate away from GridEngine. I want to assure you that while it is WMCS’s intention to shutdown GridEngine as outlined in the blog post https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/14/toolforge-and-grid-engine/, a shutdown date for GridEngine has not yet been set. The goal of the migration is to migrate as many tools as possible onto kubernetes and ensure as smooth a transition as possible for everyone. Once the majority of tools have migrated, discussion on a shutdown date is more appropriate. See T314664: [infra] Decommission the Grid Engine infrastructure.

As noted in https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/16/toolforge-gridengine-debian-10-buster-migration/ some use cases are already supported by kubernetes and should be migrated. If your tool can migrate, please do plan a migration. Reach out if you need help or find you are blocked by missing features. Most of all, WMCS is here to support you.

However, it’s possible your tool needs a mixed runtime environment or some other features that aren't yet present in https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/18/toolforge-jobs-framework/. We’d love to hear of this or any other blocking issues so we can work with you once a migration path is ready. Thanks for your hard work as volunteers and help in this migration!

Tried implementing a little over a month ago, however I need an environment that has both python 3.9 & the mysql/mariadb command

@komla @nskaggs Going to need additional time to rewrite my tool. Could I please get a time extension on the shutdown? Thanks.

@Fastily of course. Thank you for providing an update. If you have specific questions or need help, please do reach out. Good luck and thanks for helping us migrate!

@nskaggs Do you know if the cron (i.e. crontab) functionality of toolforge tool accounts is going away with the deprecation of Grid Engine? Thanks!

@Fastily cron jobs functionality is still available with similar syntax. See: scheduling cron jobs

@Fastily You might also find the use case continuity table useful

@komla I'm aware of those, but does this mean that using/running crontab from the command line in tool accounts is going away? I have a script (which drives my recurring database reports) that requires awk, mariadb, and python3.11. Obviously, I'd have to use different containers for each command. Ideally, I'd like to run sequential toolforge jobs (using the --wait arg) driven by this script. This would make migrating fairly straightforward. Otherwise, I'll have to more-or-less rewrite the entire thing which would be a heavy lift.

In T319741#9412019, @Fastily wrote:

@komla I'm aware of those, but does this mean that using/running crontab from the command line in tool accounts is going away?

Yes.

Obviously, I'd have to use different containers for each command.

You can also use the new build service to build a container with all of those tools included to be able to run all in a simple script.