Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Standards for external services

More standards for WMF production?

4
Summary by GLavagetto (WMF)

The RfC now presents principles rather than implementations.

CDanis (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I really like the list of requirements for Wikimedia production, but I was wondering if it would also make sense to standardize on WMF-preferred mechanisms for monitoring, service discovery, RPC protocol, etc., at least when the service in question something also WMF-developed -- or if that was outside of the scope of this proposal?

GLavagetto (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I think you nailed an important point - this document loses a lot of its standardizing power if we don't get into (some) details of the implementation that impose a better standardization across the board.

While the principles defined here should be (almost) immutable with time, the implementation guide stemming from it might evolve at a much faster place.

For example: we want an application to be observable and its metrics exposed (principle), we want them exposed under the /metrics endpoint and to contain binned percentiles of latency for every endpoint we have and counters for requests and errors (implementation guideline).

I would like to make this distinction more explicit in the document so that once this is approved we can link it to the current version of the implementation guidelines.

CDanis (WMF) (talkcontribs)

That sounds great to me.

Mobrovac-WMF (talkcontribs)

I agree. The text of this RfC should be such that it is immutable over time. At the same time, it should point to a different document that gets into the nitty gritty implementation details that are required at the time.