Beta Cluster

Wikimedia Foundation project Beta cluster Production-like environment suitable for final-stage testing of new features. Group: Wikimedia Release Engineering Start: 2012-03-01 Team members: Antoine Musso, Dan Duvall, Mukunda Modell, Tyler Cipriani

The Beta Cluster is a functional, production-like environment in the Cloud VPS that is suitable for final-stage testing of new features. It runs off git master and has its MediaWiki core and extensions code updated about every ten minutes. Beta Cluster is one of the Wikimedia test wikis. It does not use SUL logins, so users need to create separate accounts.

• See the overview of its configuration.

Rationale

The aim is to provide an exact copy of the WMF production cluster (including db hosts, apaches, logging, squids, varnish caching, image scalers, etc.) using Cloud VPS instances.

Open tasks

See the workboard in Phabricator.

Testing changes on Beta Cluster

See Deploy to Beta Cluster for deployment steps.

Logs from the beta cluster are sent to Logstash and can be seen at logstash-beta.wmflabs.org. This site is currently password-protected, for an account look in: ssh deployment-deploy01.deployment-prep.eqiad.wmflabs sudo cat /root/secrets.txt. If for some reason your EventLogging events aren't showing up in the dashboard, maybe try the logs and database. If that's not working, maybe eventlogging and / or the machine needs to be rebooted. Ping the folks in #wmf-analytics.

If you need to run a maintenance script on the Beta Cluster, ssh to deployment-deploy01.deployment-prep.eqiad.wmflabs (proxying through bastion.wmflabs.org).

If you need to check the databases, they're hosted on machines with the name *dbXX* among the ones listed here: https://tools.wmflabs.org/openstack-browser/project/deployment-prep.

If you just need to run some queries, ssh to deployment-deploy01.eqiad.wmflabs and run sql deploymentwiki or sql enwiki replacing those with any other dbname you need.

Stash messages to the beta cluster's server admin log by using the prefix "!log " in #wikimedia-releng.

See also

• Wikimedia Labs#Background

Historical Documents

• Specifications: Wikimedia Labs/Things to fix in beta
• Schedule: see the old Labs plan (revisions 1, 2, and 3)
• 2014-15 Q3 (potential) plans