KubeCon 2015

Wikimedia Tool Labs is a free and fully open source cluster environment made available to anyone who asks, to experiment with anything Wikimedia related. It's an important part of the Wikimedia universe – a study has found that when our bot infrastructure is down, the amount of time it takes to remove vandalism from Wikipedia almost doubles! (http://stuartgeiger.com/wikisym13-cluebot.pdf).

In the 10 years it has been active it has accumulated lots of 'jury-rigged' homegrown solutions - based primarily on the last open source version of OpenGridEngine. This has led to interesting custom setups that users have embraced, got to work once and expect to keep working. Most users are volunteers, so we can't force them to change their code to adapt to new things too frequently
It is quite hard to follow most modern deployment practices with our current architecture, and most code does not (some are still CGIs!). Kubernetes seems to allow us to both provide a legacy, backwards compatible interface for users who are unwilling to change, and a more modern, 'native' kubectl interface for people who are - 'best of both worlds'. This 'backwards compatibility' setup is made possible by replicating our current runtime environment via docker images, thus allowing people to continue using their current setups with no changes. People who want to move to saner systems can just treat us as 'yet another kubernetes cluster' as much as possible - helping commoditize our infrastructure, which is A Good Thing.

This talk will cover:
# What Tool Labs is, and why it is important
# A quick overview of our current setup, and why it is hard to change
# Ongoing kubernetes based work to overhaul this setup
# What kubernetes is going to offer to its users
# Call for people to get involved - all of our infrastructure is open source and open to outside contributions!