Today I drafted lists of open questions for testing folks (Quality Services and Test Platform teams) and for SRE folks (Service Operations team) along with a straw-dog proposal utilizing my personal answers to the questions. Docs have been shared with @SDunlap and @akosiaris for further distribution as appropriate. Everything is in gdocs at this point just because that is an easier tool for early stage comments and discussions than wiki pages. My hope is that we get some initial discussion going that we can use in followup conversations during the upcoming MediaWiki/Developer Experience offsite in Barcelona.

I apparently only tracked the work on this task in the on-wiki progress reports. This is probably fine, but makes this task look like it has been stalled for many months. That however is not the actual case!

Following interviews and other discussions with a number of folks across the RelEng, SRE, Testing Platform, and Quality Services teams a broad consensus has been reached on the initial deployment design and its constraints. This has been published at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Pretrain#Straw-dog_proposal. There are many lower level details still to be addressed, but @thcipriani and I have high hopes that the areas of agreement that have been established with this document will make it easier to proceed with implementation.