MCWS Module Proposal

Mozilla Communities Web Services
#1

Hi,

Kensie has worked with myself and some other community members to put together a proposal for better delivering Web Services to Communities.

This would restructure the delivery of services like hosting, domains and emails which are currently provided to communities.

Creating a module would provide clear authority around these services, as well as allowing communities to be equal stakeholders in what services are delivered, and how.

The module also creates accountability on the part of communities which will allow for better communication between resource owners and the groups that provide them (eg Community Ops), faster problem solving (eg downtime recovery), and impact (better supported sites are better quality sites).

Before we submit the module proposal to governance, we want to get your feedback. This document is what we think is realistic plan for implementing the module.

Module launch proposal

This document is a our vision of what the module could become once fully implemented:

Vision Statement

Please ask us lots of questions if anything is unclear or seems wrong.

2 Likes
New strategies for communities
#2

It’s mentioned that community ops will be responsible for deploying security upgrades. Who will be responsible for deployment of other updates? The site owners, I believe. How much freedom or access to the server will they have? Will there be continuous deployment methods that would automatically update sites from git repositories? Can there be multiple site owners? Will they become a single point of failure?

#3

Can you quote the part you mean? I’d like to be able to make sure the wording is clear enough!

The idea is that the site owners are primarily responsible, but that Community Ops and other groups are also responsible for lending help as needed. In some cases we are hosting a platform for the communities, like Discourse, or WordPress. In that case Community Ops would be the ones to manage the updates entirely (while properly communicating with the communities affected). In other cases, the community might be in charge, but might ask for help.

In terms of site owners, our opinion is that it is up to the community. On our end we simply need a list of people that the community has given authority to make decisions or approve changes, who are committed to being responsive to us. So if there is an update, we would contact the people on the list provided by the community, and once we get a response from one of those people saying “go/don’t go” then we would go (or talk with them to find the blocker).

@yousef you would be better to reply to the question about continuous deployment and git. Though on the surface it seems like it should be ok.

#4

Most of the community sites will be hosted on Mesos using Docker containers, so there won’t be any access to the servers. However, communities can edit their dockerfiles as they wish and we will be able to help.

Eventually, yes.

#5

These services will be supported and managed by Community Ops in collaboration with other MCS Modules and with other Mozilla groups (eg Mozilla Security). Community Ops will be responsible for responding to security events, system/service monitoring and alerting.

under “submodule: community ops” in MCWS vision statement.

hmm… so, only docker things. I’ve not used docker quite enough. Is it easy to create a docker file for a small bash script that should run on the server? In other words, will this allow such small server based tasks to work. For example, what if I want to run a Telegram bot?

#6

Looks good to me, great work!