Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/CI Futures WG/Meetings/2019-03-14

WMF working group for the future of CI

Context: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG

Meeting 2019-03-08

On Google Hangouts Meet. Present:

• Lars
• Zeljko
• Brennen
• Dan

Agenda

The goal of this meeting is to review what's happened since yesterday's meeting and plan work until next meeting.

Actions from previous meeting:

• TODO: Lars: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T217595 (Concourse CI)
• Done: Brennen to double-check gerrithub  Done
• Done: Željko to continue to look for more possible candidates
• TODO: Lars to document how to build Blubber and run unit tests in CI
• TODO: Dan to evaluate JenkinsX
• TODO: Brennen to evaluate Zuul v3
• TODO: Zeljko to evaluate HarborMaster

Notes

Concourse

• Lars is still mid-evaluation of Concourse. Anyone else looked at it?
  • Brennen: Started down this path, will give it a few more minutes this afternoon.
• We met with Pivotal. Comments? Opinions?
  • Z: They were open, that's a good sign.
  • Discussion of open core.
  • Lars: Bigger worry is that it's much harder to get started than GitLab - still haven't implemented toy CI project. In the case of GitLab, it was 10 minutes or so (ignoring Go problems) - Concourse is more work. GitLab - added a .yaml file.
  • Lars: Concourse would require some automation to make things as easy as GitLab.
  • Dan: It might be a benefit to have pipeline definition decoupled. Some people complain about having to add metadata to repos.
  • Z: People having to be aware of separate repos and stuff has disadvantages.
  • Lars: We need to make things so easy that people never bother us and don't ever complain about anything again. :)
• Dan: Another concern is that it's built around the assumption of a pull model - polls repos. Our system is built on listening to the Gerrit event stream.
  • We can build the event-based feature, but it something we'd have to own.
  • Discussion of how we're going to have to build scaffolding for anything we propose, probably.
  • Discussion of code review, issue tracking, hard decisions.
  • Lars: It seems like GitLab would require less scaffolding than Concourse.
  • Summary of discussion: We haven't totally ruled out Concourse yet, though there are some marks against.

Other evaluations, discussion

• JenkinsX?
  • Dan: Didn't get far enough to give substantial feedback, but the basic thing to note is that it's sort of a toolchain detached from Jenkins itself. Yet another slightly orthogonal piece to the puzzle.
  • Discussion of CD foundation - who's actually doing something vs. marketing; Tekton. Who is committing to change their system? We don't know.
    • Lars: CD foundation seems too late to affect this WG, too early to affect anyone else.
  • Z: Those tools do look like things that're actually used by big orgs.
  • Dan: Jenkins X is a big toolchain that's being used to change the model for CI... Different model than traditional Jenkins setup.
  • Dan: One thing to consider is k8s. If we focus on things that can utilize our k8s infrastructure, I think that's an important decision point.
  • Lars: Some requirements (mobile) aren't going to fit k8s.
  • Dan: We might be able to bridge here, but it's going to be a PITA no matter what.
  • Z: Maybe we should consider mobile app CI out of scope for the moment.
  • Lars: We've been asked to keep it in mind.

• Zuul v3?
  • Brennen hasn't started yet.

• Harbormaster?
  • Zeljko hasn't started yet, had a short chat with Mukunda - similar model to GitLab.
  • Mukunda offered evaluation assistance here.

• Sourcehut
  • Summary of Brennen's eval here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T217852
  • TODO: Zeljko to take a quick second look.

Requirements prioritising?

• Should we order the hard requirements so that the list starts with the ones we think are most important, and maybe demote the rest to softer requirements?
• What would be a good process for this?

• TODO: Lars to set up list for voting after this meeting
• TODO: All to vote on hard requirements in Etherpad

Winnow down list of candidates?

• Quick survey of stuff in spreadsheet.
• TODO: Zeljko to create some tickets.

Next blog post

• What can we put into the next blog post (Friday)?
• Would be nice to report some progress.
• Discuss blog post in meeting next week.

Next meeting

• When shall we meet next? What should we do by then?
  • Monday 17:00 UTC

Actions

• TODO: Dan to reparent the Jenkins X ticket to the main WG ticket
• TODO: Zeljko to have a look at sourcehut
• TODO: Lars to check with Greg on how to report