Wikipedia:Wikimedia Cloud Services

Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS) (formerly known as WMFLabs or Labs) is a flexible computing ecosystem built on OpenStack, GridEngine, and Kubernetes. The project empowers technical contribution to the Wikimedia software world. The products and resources of the WMCS project are available for use by anyone connected with the Wikimedia movement. Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by a Wikimedia Foundation team and Wikimedia movement volunteers. The WMCS project is managed from the Wikitech wiki which also hosts technical docs about the Foundation's main servers (aka the production environment).

Overview
The project uses OpenStack to provide developers with instances to help them debug and test software updates and changes. Each instance is a virtual environment that can be shared with others. This allows developers to test configurations before they are deployed to the production environment.

Access
Anybody is allowed to create a Wikitech account which can be used to request access to Toolforge or Cloud VPS, but all software must be released under a free license per wikitech:Wikitech:Cloud Services Terms of use. Related help can be found at wikitech:Help:Cloud VPS.

Cloud VPS
Cloud VPS provides collaboratively-owned collections of virtual private servers where users develop and maintain software projects that help the Wikimedia movement.

Toolforge


Software tools, including scripts and bots related to maintaining WMF projects, can be hosted on the Wikimedia Toolforge servers. Additional help for developers may be found at wikitech:Help:Toolforge. A complete listing of tools can be found at admin/tools, and a more detailed list of some of them at hay/directory.

Data Services
Data Services is a collection of products, including private-information-redacted copies of Wikimedia's production wiki databases, and access to Wikimedia Dumps.

Support and diagnostics
The list of team members that run Wikimedia Cloud Services can be found at Wikimedia Cloud Services team. A list of sysadmins for Toolforge is available at openstack-browser/project/tools. Developers may get additional help at:
 * - IRC channel on Libera Chat
 * cloud@lists.wikimedia.org - Wikimedia Cloud Services mailing list archives

Operational status
The operational status of Wikimedia Cloud VPS can be found at the following;
 * //graphite.wmflabs.org
 * nagf


 * Database replication lag
 * database lag as reported by the heartbeat_p database
 * db replag

History
Wikimedia Cloud Services was designed to give volunteer software developers a place to write and test software for WMF operations, with the goal of increasing volunteers' ability to help maintain WMF's infrastructure. It was opened for beta testing to a limited number of users in October 2011. After several months of testing, the service was opened to the public in April 2012.

Migration from Toolserver to Wikimedia Cloud Services
Wikimedia Cloud Services included two main branches, initially named Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs. The latter was meant to provide a replacement for the Wikimedia Toolserver, which had been hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland.

In February 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation contracted Marc-André Pelletier to provide assistance to tool/bot authors in migrating their tools and bots to the Wikimedia Labs' servers. A help page for migrating has been set up at wikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found at Wikimedia Labs/Tool Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools.

Some users tested the migration process by transferring their tools to WMF Labs early. The full-scale migration process began in June 2013, and was expected to be complete by December 2013. By June 2014, items on the Toolserver would be deleted. The final decommissioning of the Toolserver was on July 1, 2014.

In 2017, Wikimedia Labs was renamed to Wikimedia Cloud VPS, and Tool Labs was renamed to Toolforge. This was to remove the ambiguity, and to clarify their purposes.


 * See also
 * 2013/05/30/preparing-for-the-migration-from-the-wikimedia-toolserver-to-tool-labs
 * October 2012 Signpost report
 * April 2012 Signpost article on Wikimedia Labs
 * 2012/04/16/introduction-to-wikimedia-labs/