Weekly Status Update 2015-08-19

Community Ops
#1

Originally published at: http://ops.mozilla-community.org/weekly-status-update-2015-08-19/
Since this was only our second attempt at a weekly update, we left a lot of the same updates in if we didn’t have anything new for a sub-project in case people missed them the first time around. In the future we’ll only be posting what’s new!

Discourse

Discourse UX improvements (@Leo, @yousef)

There are some changes to Discourse that should be made to make it more suitable to Mozillian's needs
  • **Status [In Progress]**: See SSO update below. (No other changes from last week) We can use help researching if any of our improvements are already in the works by the Discourse team or other plugin authors. We can use help building the plugins that we need.

SSO (@Leo)

To improve the login experience for people using Discourse within Mozilla, bridge the gap in various ways between our different instances (e.g. single username across instances), and integrate better with Mozilla wore widely (with Mozillians integration, etc.)
  • Status [In Progress]: Working on initial version of SSO server which will have the same features as our current authentication system

Discourse Documentation (@Kensie)

To make Discourse more user friendly for Mozillians, we need some good documentation on how to use it
  • Status [In Progress]: (No changes from last week) We've created a sub-category to make documentation easy to find. We can use help writing the basic how-to documentation. It will help us if people using Discourse ask us questions so we know what to include in the documentation. Need to set a timeline to get this done ASAP

MECHADISCOURSE (@Yousef)

Putting all Discourse instances on one infrastructure, automated with Ansible and CloudFormation

This will help us keep the many Discourse instances we have secure, up to date and running common plugins easily. At scale. AT SCALE. also saves us $$$ while allowing all of our instances to be HA.

  • Status [In Progress]: Pretty much everything is ready, just need to implement a few things like SSL and we can start getting instances on it.

MoFo Discourse migrations

Migrating the Webmaker, Science and Hive Discourse instances to MECHADISCOURSE

This provides the teams with more stable Infra for their Discourse instances.

  • Status [In Progress]: Production instance of Webmaker Discourse is up. Waiting on the last few fixes to MECHADISCOURSE and we can spin up new instances in minutes.

Ansible (@Tanner)

#ConfigManagement

cloud-computing-buzzwords-explained.jpg1240×1754 202 KB

Initializes servers, will be used with MECHADISCOURSE as its first “big” project

https://jira.mozilla-community.org/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?projectKey=ANS&rapidView=15

Makes it 100x easier to set up servers

  1. Status [In progress]: Production-ready, Jenkins has been set up with Crowd so we can trigger Ansible tasks easily.

Monitoring (@Tanner)

Tested out a few services like DataDog, but they're unreasonably expensive for where we are right now.

Not using Icinga because it’s no longer a fork of Nagios, more or less its own thing - Nagios isn’t exactly great, but it’s an (the?) industry standard so generally well-supported and well-documented.

  • **Status [In progress]:** Trying to decide between using Nagios or trying to get funding for a paid solution. Discussion here.

Community Hosting (@Tanner, @yousef)

No changes from last week

Audit

We need to understand which sites are being actively used and which no longer need hosting, or need different hosting than they currently have

Status [Backlog]: Need to define minimum viable product (MVP) for community website to measure against. We’ll be reaching out to relevant communities and teams to start working on this. We could use help from people who’d like to help drive this.

Migration

We will be moving away from OVH to simplify community hosting and save money

Status [In Progress]: Mesosphere is in progress, awaiting some approvals on Participation Infrastructure side

Documentation (@Kensie)

No changes from last week

Discourse documentation

(see above)

Wiki update

Our wiki pages our out of date, and shouldn't be under IT anymore
  • Status [stalled]: Discourse documentation is a higher priority. In the fall will schedule another sprint. If some dedicated soul wanted to take this on for us, we'd be happy to help provide information and review the content.

Confluence (@Kensie)

Links to JIRA, will use it to help with project management, decision tracking.
  • Status [In Progress]: Help from Atlassian experts would be very welcome!

Matrix (@Leo)

Communication protocol which attempts to bind various different ones together - could possibly be used by us as a Telegram-esque IRC bouncer

Miscellaneous

  • Set up Crowd for authentication for Jenkins, Jira, Confluence and for whatever monitoring we end up going with.
  • Discussing proposals for MozFest sessions

Contribution Opportunities

Recap of contribution opportunities from status updates:
  • Discourse
    • Research/coding customizations
    • Documenting how to use Discourse/need questions to answer
    • Ansible expertise welcome
  • Monitoring
    • Nagios experts/mentors welcome
  • Community Hosting
    • Research MVP for community sites
  • Documentation
    • Discourse (see above)
    • Need writers to help drive wiki update
    • Atlassian experts welcome to help with Confluence/JIRA organization