This week we are trying out a new format for our project meeting, with our top priority being to produce a weekly status update. The update is broken down into the smaller projects we’re currently working on (think sprints or heartbeats). They include a brief description of why we’re working on the project, and the current status of the project. If you’d like a more complete background on a project please ask! In the future these will be linked.

We’ve also included some suggested contribution opportunities in the status updates. These are recapped at the bottom. If you would like to help with a project, but there isn’t a contribution opportunity listed for it, that’s ok, just ask. The main contact for each project is listed next to it.

Originally posted on Discourse.

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]: 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.

Discourse Documentation (@Kensie)

To make Discourse more user friendly for Mozillians, we need some good documentation on how to use it

• Status [In Progress]: 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]: Currently can bootstrap a single instance, working on templating out configuration so we can bootstrap multiple instances with a single file. Help needed with creating the Ansible playbooks.

Ansible (@Tanner)

#ConfigManagement – Makes it 100x easier to set up servers

• http://cerasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/cloud-computing-buzzwords-explained.jpg
• Initializes servers, will be used with MECHADISCOURSE as its first “big” project
• https://github.com/Mozilla-cIT/ansible-playbooks

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

• Status [In progress]: Right now, it creates users for the core team, adds their ssh keys, creates a “core-team” group, adds the core team to “core-team”, and sets “core-team” to have access to passwordless sudo in /etc/sudoers.d/core-team

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]: Currently working on setting up Nagios, looking into best way to handle authentication. Considering ldap, because it would mean only storing passwords once rather than several times (Jenkins, Nagios, etc.). Nagios expertise/mentorship very welcome.

Community Hosting (@Tanner, @yousef)

Audit (@Kensie)

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 (@yousef)

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)

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

Links to JIRA, will use it to help with project management, decision tracking.

• Status [In Progress]: Help from Atlassian experts would be very welcome!

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

http://ops.mozilla-community.org/weekly-status-update-2015-08-12/