Mailing List Archive

New experimental backend for the Wikimedia Debug browser extension: what to expect
Hi all,

This email is of interest to you only if you're a user of the "Wikimedia
Debug" browser extension. If you're not, you can safely skip it.

As the more attentive might have noticed, the Wikimedia Debug browser
extension started offering a new option in the drop-down menu, besides the
usual mwdebug servers, labeled "k8s-experimental". That is, as the name
suggests, a very experimental setup of mediawiki running on kubernetes and
is not *yet* a place where you will be able to test your releases.

Right now, that installation is a work in progress, but nonetheless it
seemed important to us to have a way to browse the wikis from the
installation running on kubernetes while we iron out bugs in preparation
for the actual migration of production traffic.

This installation can thus:
- run on outdated versions of mediawiki (although we're trying to follow
train releases).
- be down for extended periods of time while we debug something, without
warning.
It also doesn't support (yet) profiling via xhprof.

So while we welcome the curious to poke around at the performance and bugs
of the installation, it is not a suitable tool (yet) to debug your releases
on.

I will add filters where appropriate to avoid logs from this installation
from polluting your dashboards in the coming days, but in the meantime, if
you see a log line coming from a server with a strange name like
"mediawiki-pinkunicorn"... that's mediawiki running on kubernetes and you
can mostly ignore it!

You can follow our progress at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283056

Cheers,

Giuseppe

--
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
Re: New experimental backend for the Wikimedia Debug browser extension: what to expect [ In reply to ]
A quick update: it was decided that, while we get to the point where we can
keep releases in sync with production with ease, we will limit public
access to the k8s installation to group0 and test wikis. The restriction
will be lifted once we feel confident we'll run the same code in k8s and
physical servers all the time.

Thanks,

Giuseppe

On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 6:16 PM Giuseppe Lavagetto <glavagetto@wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This email is of interest to you only if you're a user of the "Wikimedia
> Debug" browser extension. If you're not, you can safely skip it.
>
> As the more attentive might have noticed, the Wikimedia Debug browser
> extension started offering a new option in the drop-down menu, besides the
> usual mwdebug servers, labeled "k8s-experimental". That is, as the name
> suggests, a very experimental setup of mediawiki running on kubernetes and
> is not *yet* a place where you will be able to test your releases.
>
> Right now, that installation is a work in progress, but nonetheless it
> seemed important to us to have a way to browse the wikis from the
> installation running on kubernetes while we iron out bugs in preparation
> for the actual migration of production traffic.
>
> This installation can thus:
> - run on outdated versions of mediawiki (although we're trying to follow
> train releases).
> - be down for extended periods of time while we debug something, without
> warning.
> It also doesn't support (yet) profiling via xhprof.
>
> So while we welcome the curious to poke around at the performance and bugs
> of the installation, it is not a suitable tool (yet) to debug your releases
> on.
>
> I will add filters where appropriate to avoid logs from this installation
> from polluting your dashboards in the coming days, but in the meantime, if
> you see a log line coming from a server with a strange name like
> "mediawiki-pinkunicorn"... that's mediawiki running on kubernetes and you
> can mostly ignore it!
>
> You can follow our progress at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T283056
>
> Cheers,
>
> Giuseppe
>
> --
> Giuseppe Lavagetto
> Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
>


--
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation