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!

Following the instructions on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Stretch_deprecation#Move_a_grid_engine_webservice I re-deployed the webservice using webservice --backend=kubernetes php7.4 start. Will it automatically (re)start with Kubernetes going forward?

Reverted to Grid engine as Kubernetes appears to return a 503 after some hours.

In T319803#8299226, @Harej wrote:

Following the instructions on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Toolforge_Stretch_deprecation#Move_a_grid_engine_webservice I re-deployed the webservice using webservice --backend=kubernetes php7.4 start. Will it automatically (re)start with Kubernetes going forward?

In the case of this very particular combination of Kubernetes and the PHP 7.4 image, yes because these are the defaults for webservice start today. It is more future safe however to setup a service.template file locally in your tool so that you have control of your own preferred defaults.

For reference this is an issue we are currently dealing with T335923

(This may not be related to my earlier reported issue, as if memory recalls I reverted it.)