[QA] Proposal for Zurich Hackathon: Production-like Vagrant

Thu Jan 23 01:43:46 UTC 2014

I've talked a bit with a number of you over the last year or so about a
dream I have of a Vagrant instance that replicates, as much as possible,
our production environment (like betalabs, but your very own personal,
portable, betalabs). Having something like this would be tremendously
valuable. It would mean:

* Getting a new developer up and running to start writing production-worthy
code would be trivial (at least in terms of setting up a dev environment)
** This could be huge at hackathons and on-boarding new engineers
* It would allow us all to test our code against a production-like
environment WITHOUT needing to first merge code and then test on betalabs
* It would eradicate (or come close to eradicating) the "oh, it worked on
my machine, why doesn't it work on yours/betalabs/production/etc" scenario
* It would get us closer to a unified environment for easier browser and
unit testing (and perhaps in the future, integration/api testing)
* And more!

My intuition says this is doable, given that so much of production has been
puppetized. What do you all think? Would you be interested in working on
something like this at the Zurich Hackathon and/or beyond? It would likely
require buy-in/support from someone from ops and platform as well, but I
wanted to run it by you all before taking it further.

-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/attachments/20140122/f24a6fe2/attachment.html>