Hi all,
As you might know, the Beta Cluster (aka deployment-prep)[0] hasn't had
an official maintainer for a while, and as a result of that its
infrastructure has accumulated a large amount of technical debt.
[0]:
https://meta.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/
The Beta cluster currently tries to emulate the production MediaWiki
cluster, but it doesn't have any official support from the SRE
team[1][2]. The SRE team, on the other hand, has very different needs
from a staging cluster than what Beta currently offers and what the
MediaWiki developers need.
[1]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T215217#4965494
[2]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T215217#6665452
I wrote a longer blog post on the subject[3], but I believe it's
reasonable to conclude that we should start thinking on what might be
used to provide replacements for Beta's current use cases, instead of
thinking on how we can keep the current Beta alive in the long term.
[3]:
https://taavi.wtf/posts/deployment-prep-needs-a-replacement/
It's going to be a fairly large project which would need dedicated
resources, but so would keeping Beta up to date with infrastructure
changes (for example the MW-on-K8s project which will completely
overhaul how MW is deployed and served).
Taavi