Wikimedia Technology/Goals/2019-20 Q1

Technology Department Team Goals and Status for Q1 FY19/20 in support of the  Medium Term Plan (MTP) Priorities and Annual Plan for FY19/20



Technical Engagement
Team Manager: Birgit Müller
 * - Pokem ipsum dolor sit amet Trubbish Porygon Seismitoad Grass Swalot Town Map. Ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat Plain Badge Ninetales Lilligant Professor Elm Pidgeot incididunt ut labore.
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Dependencies on: Electrike Phanpy Cascoon and Professor Elm Pidgeot

 Status 
 * July 2019 - Mewtwo Strikes Back...
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Fundraising Tech
Team Manager: Erika Bjune
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Dependencies on: Electrike Phanpy Cascoon and Professor Elm Pidgeot

 Status 
 * July 2019 - Mewtwo Strikes Back...
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Research
Team Manager: Leila Zia
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Dependencies on: Electrike Phanpy Cascoon and Professor Elm Pidgeot

 Status 
 * July 2019 - Mewtwo Strikes Back...
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Security
Team Manager: John Bennett
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Dependencies on: Electrike Phanpy Cascoon and Professor Elm Pidgeot

 Status 
 * July 2019 - Mewtwo Strikes Back...
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Core Platform
Team Manager: Corey Floyd
 * - Pokem ipsum dolor sit amet Trubbish Porygon Seismitoad Grass Swalot Town Map. Ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat Plain Badge Ninetales Lilligant Professor Elm Pidgeot incididunt ut labore.
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Dependencies on: Electrike Phanpy Cascoon and Professor Elm Pidgeot

 Status 
 * July 2019 - Mewtwo Strikes Back...
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Analytics
Team Manager: Nuria Ruiz


 * Make easier to understand the history of all Wikimedia projects
 * Release Public Edit Data Lake Dataset in JSON/CSV or mysql dump format


 * Make easier to understand how Commons media is used across our projects.
 * Work starting on mediarequest API.


 * Increase Data Quality
 * Enthrophy-based alarms for data issues


 * Increase Data Privacy and Security
 * Make kerberos infra prod ready.


 * Modern Event Platform
 * * Continue moving events from job queue to event gate main.
 * * Development work for kafka connect
 * * Schema Repository CI for convention and backwards compatibility enforcement


 * Operational Excellence. Increase Resilience of Systems
 * * New zookeeper cluster for tier-2
 * Operational Excellence. Reduce Operational Load by Phasing Out Legacy Systems
 * * Sunset MySQL data store for eventlogging.

 Status 
 * July 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Search Platform
Team Manager: Guillaume Lederrey
 * - Reduce complexity of the platform: Reduce technical debt and increase automation to reduce workload and make it easier to add new search features
 * Refactor query highlighting to make it extensible by other extensions
 * Refactor Mjolnir jobs into separate smaller jobs
 * - Core work: Maintain CirrusSearch and the Search API and WDQS
 * Core maintenance work (always )
 * Improve WDQS updater performances by writing custom code for updates
 * Full data reimport for WDQS to enable optimizations that were done last quarter
 * Work through the backlog of bugs and performance improvements for WDQS with our contractor
 * Start the hiring process for a new WDQS Engineer
 * Hardware renewal: replace elastic1017-1031
 * - Continue to identify and enable machine learning and natural language processing techniques to improve the quality of search
 * "Did you mean" suggestions: deploy method0 to production
 * - Underserved communities benefit from search techniques that to date are only used on big wikis like machine learning–aided ranking, word embeddings or language specific analyzers: Language analysis / Phab work
 * Work on highest priority language tickets (Discovery Search board / Language Stuff—always )
 * - Structured Data on Commons support (as needed)
 * RDF export
 * Address the indexing issues of MediaInfo (labels vs descriptions)

Dependencies on: RDF export: WMDE / Wikidata, Hardware renewal: DC Ops, MediaInfo indexing: SDoC

 Status 
 * July 2019 - —> (to be discussed)
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Scoring Platform
Team Manager: Aaron Halfaker
 * - Build out the Jade API to support user-actions
 * - Build/improve models in response to community demand
 * - Support operations infrastructure improvements (k8s, redis SPOF)

Dependencies on: SRE

 Status 
 * July 2019 -.
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Release Engineering
Team Manager: Greg Grossmeier

Priority: Reduce complexity of the platform to make it easier for new developers to contribute.

 * - All applicable new and existing services (and partially MediaWiki) exist in the Deployment Pipeline
 * Migrate restrouter
 * (Stretch): MobileContentService
 * (Stretch): Preparatory MediaWiki config clean-up & static loading work
 * - Actionable code health metrics are provided for code stewards
 * Scope out requirements for a self-hosted version of SonarQube for our use.
 * Expand set of repositories covered by code health metrics (via sonarqube)
 * - Provide a standardized local MediaWiki development environment
 * Migrate local-charts to deployment-charts
 * Instantiate testing and linting of helm charts
 * Preliminary work on a CLI for setup/management

Dependencies on: SRE, Code Health Metrics WG

Core: Developers have a consistent and dependable deployment service.

 * - Iteratively improve our deployment tooling, service, and processes.
 * Streamline the Kibana -> Phab error reporting workflow (using client-side code, at first)
 * - Align developer services with SRE best practices.
 * Work with SRE to identify and implement needs of Phabricator and Gerrit (expected to last into Q2)

Dependencies on: SRE, Performance

Core: Maintain and improve the Continuous Integration and Testing services

 * - Maintain CI and testing services
 * Scope updated CI/testing KPIs
 * Set up an experimental elastic search instance to store and analyze CI logs and metrics
 * - Evaluate, select, and implement a new CI infrastructure.
 * POCs of GitLab and Zuul3 systems; evaluate options
 * Document an implementable architecture for what we want in new CI

Dependencies on: SRE/Others invested in CI architecture choices

Core: A clear set of unit and integration testing tools is available for all supported engineering languages.

 * - Update the existing system test tooling and developer education.
 * Update existing Selenium documentation (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Selenium/Node.js)

Dependencies on: none.

 Status 
 * July 2019 -
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Performance
Team Manager: Kate Chapman
 * - Support AbuseFilterCachingParser deployment. T156095
 * - Figure out the right store to use for the main stash (dynamo? mcrouter?). T212129
 * - Add Grafana dashboard for WANObjectCache stats. T197849
 * - Support Parsing Team with performance insights on Parsoid-php roll out.
 * - Write two performance topic blog posts.
 * - Line up interested speakers for a FOSDEM Web Performance devroom proposal.
 * - [Ongoing] Support and maintenance of MediaWiki's object caching and data access components.
 * - [Ongoing] Support and maintenance of WebPageTest and synthetic testing infrastructure.
 * - [Ongoing] Support and maintenance of MediaWiki's ResourceLoader.
 * - [Ongoing] Support and maintenance of Fresnel.

Dependencies on: SRE, CPT, Parsing

 Status 
 * July 2019 -
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -



Site Reliability Engineering
Directors: Mark Bergsma and Faidon Liambotis

Cross-cutting

 * Firefighting improvements, ONFIRE (continuation)
 * Produce a standardized template for a status document for ongoing major incidents
 * Iterate on a process for running the incident documentation review board; review 90% of incident documents written this quarter
 * [stretch] Research possible implementations for synchronizing team contact information to everyone's phone


 * Database automation (continuation)
 * Productionize dbctl (deploy, import data, set up alerts)
 * Set up MediaWiki to optionally read the database configuration from etcd
 * Gradually migrate all MediaWiki instances to read the database configuration from etcd

Service Operations
Team Manager: Mark Bergsma


 * Complete the transition to PHP 7 in production
 * Move all application server & API traffic to PHP 7
 * Move maintenance scripts to PHP 7
 * Move jobrunners to PHP 7
 * [stretch] Remove HHVM from production


 * Self-service Deployment Pipeline
 * Define and document the process for service owners to deploy a new service onto the pipeline
 * Support migration of services RESTrouter, wikifeeds by service owners

Dependencies on: Release Engineering, Core Platform, Performance

Data Persistence
Team Manager: Mark Bergsma


 * Address Database infrastructure blockers on datacenter switchover
 * Order, rack and setup 10 new hosts in codfw
 * Failover all codfw masters
 * Failover eqiad masters to new hosts and decommission old masters
 * [stretch] Deploy codfw non-Mediawiki database proxies


 * Strengthen backup infrastructure and support
 * Deploy new Bacula hardware
 * Transfer ownership and knowledge of Bacula backup infrastructure
 * [stretch] Migrate general backup service from old to new host(s)

Traffic
Team Manager: Brandon Black


 * TBD

Infrastructure Foundations
Team Manager: Faidon Liambotis


 * Puppet 5 (continuation & wrap-up)
 * Upgrade all production Puppetmasters to Puppet 5.5
 * Upgrade production PuppetDB to 6.2 in both data centers


 * Configuration management for network operations
 * Productionize existing configuration management software (jnt)
 * Integrate with Netbox for device selection and topology data gathering
 * Add safe push method for the configuration: interactive and sequential
 * [stretch] Evaluate Netbox to store network secrets


 * Bare metal cloud
 * Import existing management interfaces IPs into Netbox
 * Automate the assignment of new host's management interface IP
 * Automate the generation of management interface DNS records


 * Identity Management & Single Sign On
 * Build a production prototype of an Apereo CAS identity provider
 * Switch (at least) one service to authenticate against the identity provider

Observability
Team Manager: Faidon Liambotis


 * Improve our alerting capabilities
 * Produce and circulate an alerting infrastructure roadmap
 * Establish periodic alerts reviews, complete one by EOQ
 * Reduce Icinga alert noise


 * Tech debt: sunsetting of Graphite (part 1)
 * Deprecate statsd: fully migrate >= 30% of producers off statsd
 * [stretch] Deploy Thanos (long-term storage) stateless components: sidecar and query

Data Center Operations
Team Manager: Willy Pao


 * Refine procurement process
 * Improve average end-to-end turnaround time from hardware request to hardware delivery
 * Tighten up procurement cycle by implementing regularly scheduled deadlines for quotes, approvals, and purchase orders
 * Implement general template form for service owners to fill in


 * Improve turnaround times on repair/break-fix tasks
 * Implement a new hardware repair template & refine existing triaging processes
 * Enforce regular use of hardware troubleshooting runbook
 * Hire and on-board a contractor for additional support in eqiad
 * Identify 3rd party contractor to take care of straightforward tasks at remote caching sites


 * Operational excellence: resolve all inventory inconsistencies
 * Clean up existing backlog of Netbox inconsistencies and data errors
 * Keep all Netbox reports in a "passed" state
 * Maintain zero error reports going forward


 * Recycle all existing decommissioned hardware
 * Clear out existing decommissioned hardware in ulsfo and codfw
 * Determine alternative disposition company for Juniper equipment

 Status 
 * July 2019 - Mewtwo Strikes Back...
 * August 2019 -
 * September 2019 -