Wikimedia Platform Engineering/MediaWiki Core Team/Quarterly review, April 2014

This is an outline for a review of the MediaWiki Core team which will take place at WMF on April 15, 2014.
 * Notes for this review

Team
See Wikimedia MediaWiki Core Team page.

Changes since last review: (none)

HipHop VM Deployment
Plans for the quarter with status:
 * Get a production service running on HHVM. (one of: job queue, l10n update, image scalers, etc.)
 * Status: Getting HHVM serving up beta (done by review?)
 * Port LuaSandbox
 * Status: In progress (done by review?). Tim made enough improvement Zend plugin compatibility layer that its up to the job.
 * Port wikidiff2
 * Status: Done (thanks Max Semenik!)
 * Port wmerrors
 * Status: Not needed
 * Port other extensions
 * Status: Done by review?
 * Packages and Puppet manifests for provisioning HHVM on Ubuntu Precise.
 * Status: Not done. Work is in progress, but we'll want to rely on some combination of upstream work with Faidon and possibly others in TechOps to accomplish this.
 * Jenkins job that tests patches to core and extensions using HHVM.
 * Status: Done
 * Jenkins job that runs the full suite of unit tests against HHVM.
 * Status: Done

Search
Plan:
 * Have all sites using CirrusSearch (and thus, ElasticSearch) as the primary search engine by the end of quarter
 * Status: Partial. Non-Wikipedias switched over April 2.  (done by review?)
 * We may have an initial run at the interwiki search UI if time allows.
 * Status: Partial

Architecture/RFC Review
Tim worked part time on this. We had loftier goals for this (to help teams and individual contributors to develop specifications for implementing product requirements in a manner consistent with the design, performance, architecture, stability, etc. requirements of MediaWiki and the Wikimedia production cluster) Much of the work was just keeping the RFC review process going, and Tim was absorbed into HHVM porting work.

Deployment-related Development
LogStash is a new logging framework which should make it much easier to view and query system logs for purposes of debugging.

Plan:
 * Several team members have been and will continue to be involved in work on this as it nears initial rollout: Bryan Davis, Ori Livneh, Aaron Schulz and Antoine Musso.
 * Status: limited rollout
 * Bryan Davis work on requirements for a migration from scap to another tool with input from the Dev and Deploy process review happening on the 22nd.
 * Status: Bryan and Ori rewrote scap in Python, and have made some usability improvements to it. This have given Bryan a great deal of insight into how the overall system works.

PDF rendering
Brad continuing to work in a supporting role.

Performance Infrastructure
For next quarter: get front-end performance data piping into the same profiling data aggregator as back-end performance data and provide some unified view for looking at latency across the stack

Security
Password storage update, Security reviews

Admin tools development
Dan Garry will be scoping this project

SecurePoll cleanup
Dan Garry will be scoping this project, with Brad Jorsch doing development work if it can be scoped on time.

SUL finalisation
Dan is scoping this, and working with James on what's involved.

Central CSS discussion
Dan working on scoping

Past Quarter Allocations
This is our planned allocation for January through March of 2014:
 * Tim Starling: HHVM, Architecture/RFC Review, other review
 * Bryan Davis: scap/git-deploy, LogStash
 * Nik Everett: Search
 * Chad Horohoe: HHVM, Search
 * Brad Jorsch: SecurePoll cleanup, PDF rendering, API Maintenance, Scribunto maintenance
 * Ori Livneh: Performance Infrastructure, HHVM, git-deploy, LogStash
 * Aaron Schulz: HHVM, git-deploy, LogStash, Password storage update, l10n cache
 * Chris Steipp: Password storage update, Security reviews
 * Antoine Musso: HHVM, LogStash, JobQueue, Zuul upgrade
 * Sam Reed: Deployments
 * Dan Garry: Admin tools development (scoping out), SecurePoll (scoping out), SUL finalisation, OAuth improvements, Search

Upcoming quarter
Work-in-progress. See Wikimedia MediaWiki Core Team/Ideas list for the list we're pulling from.