[Twisted-Python] a farewell to buildbot

Glyph glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Sun Mar 3 13:41:05 MST 2019



> On Mar 3, 2019, at 9:46 AM, Evilham <contact at evilham.com> wrote:
> 
> Am 03/03/2019 um 7:32 schrieb Glyph:
>> So, do folks have any strong feelings, or would anyone like to volunteer
>> to help with some aspect of this?  As always: we don't have enough folks
>> to keep up with the operational demands of twistedmatrix.com
>> <http://twistedmatrix.com>, so if you want to dev some ops or ops some
>> infra, please speak up :).
> 
> This together with the 1password email raises following question:
> Is there anything particular that needs more support?

Thanks for asking!

> Amber's point about Buildkite's bring-your-own-builders offering sounds
> interesting, and if lack of Mensch-power is the only issue, maybe a call
> to arms in a somewhat more specific fashion would be in order?

The bystander effect might indeed be a big reason few folks have stepped forward.

Broadly speaking there are three areas that would be good to get help with, in rough order of importance (although they're all super important):

reducing the amount of regular work it takes to keep things running
setting up systems to get more concrete and immediate benefits out of our dogfooding Twisted and related technology
keeping an eye on the running systems and reacting to alerts

Projects that fall into bucket number 1 include:

dockerizing everything so that instead of a long, elaborate fabric script (https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/ <https://github.com/twisted-infra/braid/>) we can just `docker-compose up` to get something resembling our current infrastructure.  these services include:
the website
the DNS service
the mailman instance serving this list
codespeed
buildbot, if it keeps being A Thing
the IRC bot (kenaan) that reminds us of the work that needs doing
decomissioning Trac and replacing its workflows with a Github bot (note that we would want to preserve stuff like the regular dev-stats email, the IRC bot, https://twisted.reviews/ <https://twisted.reviews/> etc)
adding an API to our DNS service so that we could use i.e. DNS-01 certificate provisioning to get TLS certificates for other services

In the second bucket would come things like setting up Sentry to capture errors from all those services (web, dns, trac, etc) all of which have bits of Twisted running in them.  In the third would of course be getting admin access to these machines and restarting things when all else has failed, so that hawkowl, mark, or myself doesn't need to do it.

> I mention because that would help with some ML readers who may think "no
> way I can help with that" and actually could have the expertise on
> specific bits that are needed.

The main thing that is required here is the enthusiasm, energy, and spare time required to be responsible for some of this stuff, and to regularly dedicate a little energy to any or all of the above things.

Right now, the operations work is drudgery because nobody has the energy to take it to the next level, and it's just about trying not to break things too badly.  But if someone really put some time into it, we could potentially build some really cool event-driven demos with Twisted that could get people (and core developers!) really excited to develop more interesting features, and we have plenty of hardware to run such things.

> Also, listing needs could be a good exercise overall and it could be
> listed here: https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Infrastructure <https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Infrastructure>

A good initial project for an interested party would be perhaps to start editing that page by reading Braid and this email.

> PS: Since Amber is part of Matrix' team, I just realised the silliest
> thing: following Twisted's tradition of awesome/awful naming puns,
> Matrix' Homeserver reference implementation, synapse, is written on
> Twisted, and this project's website is... twistedmatrix.com (!)

I'm really hoping to bring back more of this.  For example, the "twisted matrix" was originally so named because the sub-projects were twisted dot something, and these were termed "dot products".

;-).

I hope this message was helpful!

-g

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