Requests for creating or deleting Cloud-VPS projects. See openstack-browser for a list of existing projects and their members. For quota changes see Cloud-VPS (Quota-requests)
Before you request a project
- Confirm you cannot run your code/bot/thing on Toolforge. You can request access to Toolforge by following the instructions on wikitech. With Toolforge, the underlying infrastructure will be taken care of for you, and you can focus on writing your tool / bot / researchy-thing.
- Only request a VPS project if you need root on the VM for a specific purpose (or need testing VMs for MediaWiki changes, etc). Remember that if you have root you have responsibilities too! :)
Maintainer responsibilities
Each Cloud VPS project must have one or more active maintainers. Maintainers must have an active Phabricator account, must subscribe to the cloud-announce mailing list, and must respond to tasks, emails, and requests for action on the part of WMCS staff and admins.
In addition, maintainers of VMs in Cloud VPS projects must provide basic maintenance on their servers: puppet needs to be kept in working order, upgrades will need to be applied periodically, and VMs will need to be periodically deleted and recreated with updated OS images.
If a project is not actively maintained, or WMCS staff are unable to contact maintainers for a long period of time, that project will be shut down and ultimately deleted along with all associated configuration and data.
Project scope
Cloud VPS projects should be scoped based around concrete products or software projects, rather than the team working on them. The three main problems that we (the Cloud Services team) have seen in the past with team ownership/scope for Cloud VPS projects are:
- Team gets disbanded/reorganized but its project needs to live on due to hosting of important VMs
- Difficulty establishing who is the primary point of contact for a given VM when trying to reclaim quota or fix a broken instance
- Tendency to close membership/participation to only team members rather than inviting participation by other volunteers
There are things that can be done to mitigate these problems, but the easiest thing to do is to create more targeted projects that are scoped to a product/project rather than a team. This can become a burden in other ways if a common group of developers is active on a large number of such projects, so we are willing to be flexible if good cause can be shown for project consolidation.
For more guidance, see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_VPS_project
Requesting a new project
To request a new project, create a task using this link, and fill out the requested information by <replacing the instructions>
Note that there's currently some restrictions on the name of the project: it should not contain underscores or special characters, because it will be used in DNS records.
Process
Requests can be granted when approved by a quorum of at least two Cloud VPS administrators. If a decision is not made asynchronously, requests are processed by the cloud-services-team during the Cloud Services team meeting every Thursday (8:00 PST) that the meeting is held. This schedule may be effected by holidays, conferences, or other unavailability.
Once approved, creation of the project in OpenStack will be handled by a member of the Cloud VPS admin team. This will typically happen within 1-2 days, but may take longer due to availability of computing resources or higher priority administration tasks.
