[IAEP] Infrastructure Team Report

[Bernie Innocenti]

== Infrastructure Team Report for September 2011 ==

=== Mission ===

Maintain and develop the collaboration and web-presence infrastructure
of Sugar Labs.


=== Wiki Home ===

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team


=== Past ===

After an initial struggle to find stable hosting, for the last two years
our machines have been humming along nicely thanks to the stable hosting
environment donated to us by the Free Software Foundation and the MIT
Media Lab and the hardware generously provided by Stefan Unterhauser.


=== Present ===

We have enough bandwidth, CPU power and storage to sustain the growth
rate of the next 2 years. In case we loose one of our hosting locations,
we could probably run our entire infrastructure on a single, faster
machine. The board has already set aside money to acquire a new server,
but at this time we don't have to spend this budget.

We operate thanks to the efforts of our core systems administrators:
Dogi and I maintain the hardware and the low-level hosting
infrastructure, Aleksey Lim is in charge of most of the development
tools. Luke Faraone manages RT, SSL certificates, mailing lists and
various other things. Chris Leonard takes good care of our wiki and
Pootle along with Rafael Ortiz. Sascha Silbe maintains Trac, Patchwork
and he monitors various services for security.

Raul, Sascha and myself are usually available to respond to support
calls on IRC. In case of an emergency, don't hesitate to call me on my
cell phone.


=== Future ===

For non-urgent requests, we ask everyone to go send mail to the contact
addresses listed in the wiki. This helps us spread the support burden
and reduce our dependency on any single individual. If we ever make you
wait more than 48h, please ping us on IRC: we don't want to become a
bottleneck for people who want to get things done in Sugar Labs.

Over the past year, I had to reduce my time commitment on the
infrastructure team and Sugar Labs in general. I don't expect the
situation to improve for the next year. However, our infrastructure is
now mature and doesn't require as much effort to maintain as it used to.
To help keep our infrastructure streamlined, I'd like to raise the pole
for adding new services: any new machine and web application must have
one clear owner who accepts to be fully accountable for its maintenance.
This could be any of our existing sysadmins, or a new volunteer. We
absolutely want to avoid unsupported, bitrotting services because they
confuse our users, make us look bad and can become a serious security
threat. Whenever a service becomes unmaintained with nobody available to
take its ownership, it will be phased out. Any existing users will be
given sufficient advance warning to migrate their data elsewhere.


=== Careers Opportunities ===

There are a number of areas in which we could use some help. Our team
wiki describes (sometimes even accurately) all the services we provide
and the people who are currently maintaining them:

  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team/Resources

If you're looking for a highly demanding, high-responsibility,
unrewarding and unpaid job, then you're a good fit for the Sugar Labs
Infrastructure Team! Please, apply here:

  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team/Getting_Involved

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team