Wikimedia Cloud Services team

The Wikimedia Cloud Services team (WMCS) is a subteam of the Technology group of Wikimedia Engineering responsible for maintaining and extending the existing Wikimedia Cloud Services computing infrastructure (virtual private server (VPS)), the Toolforge hosting environment (platform as a service (PaaS)), and many additional supporting technologies used in the Cloud Services environment. The team works in partnership with the larger Wikimedia volunteer community to manage the physical and virtual resources that power the environment and provide technical support to volunteer developers and other Wikimedia Cloud Services users.

Mission
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. Technology serves a key role in these activities by lowering barriers to large scale collaboration and reducing publishing costs to negligible levels. A significant portion of the technology used by the Wikimedia movement is developed by the movement itself and these products need support in the form of compute resources, technical guidance, and community support to flourish.

Objectives
The strategic activities of the Wikimedia Cloud Services team have two objectives to support our mission:
 * 1) Reduce the barriers to making technical contributions to the Wikimedia movement.
 * 2) Provide excellent hosting solutions to support technical projects.

Responsibilities

 * 1) Provide a stable and effective hosting platform for technical projects relevant to the Wikimedia movement when such projects are incompatible with Wikimedia Foundation production hosting.
 * 2) Develop and maintain services and platforms that empower the creation, operation, and maintenance of custom technical solutions to problems of the Wikimedia movement.
 * 3) Provide public, simple access to content and data produced by the Wikimedia projects to empower new technological and social solutions to problems of the Wikimedia movement.
 * 4) Provide technical support, documentation, and community support to foster growth and productivity of the community of users of the WMCS products.

Projects

 * Cloud VPS
 * Toolforge
 * toolsadmin.wikimedia.org

Goals

 * 2017-18 Q1
 * 2016-17 Q4