Weekly Update 2015-08-26

Community Ops
#1

Originally published at: http://ops.mozilla-community.org/weekly-update-2015-08-26/

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. We can still use help researching and 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**]: Still working on initial version of SSO server, currently working on finishing touches

Discourse Documentation (@Kensie)

To make Discourse more user friendly for Mozillians, we need some good documentation on how to use it
  • Status [**In Progress**]: Added a couple docs based on questions that came up during the week. Still need people to ask questions so we can answer them.

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. Also saves $$$ while allowing all of our instances to be HA.
  • Status [**In Progress**]: Turns out this isn't quite production ready so we're going to use our staging servers as a test-bed to iron out issues

MoFo Discourse migrations (@Yousef)

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**]: Leo is currently implementing Webmaker login for the Teach The Web Discourse

Ansible (@Tanner)

Config management, initializes servers, will be used with MECHADISCOURSE as its first "big" project. Makes it 100x easier to set up servers.
  • Status [**Done!**]: Production-ready, Jenkins has been set up so jobs can be triggered on-demand.

Monitoring (@Tanner)

we need to set up a robust monitoring solution for our sites.
  • Status [**In Progress**]: Will be using Nagios. Need to write checks and config for Nagios, and then deploy the NPRE agent to servers.

Community Hosting (@Tanner, @yousef)

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 [**In Progress**]: Michael Buluma has started work on defining a MVP (minimum viable product) for a community website.

Migration

We will be moving away from OVH to simplify community hosting and save money.
  • Status [**Stalled**]: Waiting for progress on Participation Infrastructure side

Documentation (@Kensie)

Discourse documentation (see above)

Wiki update

Our wiki pages our out of date, and shouldn't be under IT anymore
  • Status [**In Progress**]: Michael Buluma has started working on this.

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. Discussion and link to planning pad here.
  • Status [**In Progress**]: Started to investigate it, finding answers to various questions

MozFest Participation (@Kensie)

We are looking at ways our team can support MozFest, and planning session proposals that would be interesting to MozFest

Online Forum for Participants (@Tanner)

We are offering our services to host a Discourse instance for MozFest
  • Status [**In Progress**]: Putting up a Discourse instance as a PoC

Session Proposals (@Kensie)

  • Status [**In Progress**]: We have several proposals to submit, ideally by Friday (deadline is Monday).

Miscellaneous

  • Crowd didn't work as hoped. It messed with a lot of plugins for Jenkins that relied on usernames, so ldap might work better.

Contribution Opportunities

Recap of contribution opportunities from status updates and ongoing contribution opportunities:
  • 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