Weekly Update 2015-09-16

Current projects:

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:  See SSO update below. We can still use help researching and building the plugins that we need. Will discuss more improvements to work on at Discourse meeting tomorrow.
  • SSO (@leo)
    • To  improve the login experience for people using Discourse within Mozilla,  bridge the gap in various ways between our different instances (e.g.  single username across instances), and integrate better with Mozilla  wore widely (with Mozillians integration, etc.)
    • Status In Progress: Still working on initial version of SSO server, currently working on finishing touches
  • Discourse Documentation (@Kensie)
    • To make Discourse more user friendly for Mozillians, we need some good documentation on how to use it
    • Status In Progress: Need this for MozFest Discourse as well. Kensie to post in a few places asking for questions to answer, schedule a sprint.
  • 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 Stalled: Waiting to move to new MoFo AWS account before making more progress
  • MoFo Discourse migrations
    • Migrating the Webmaker, Science and Hive Discourse instances to MECHADISCOURSE
    • This provides the teams with more stable Infra for their Discourse instances.
    • Status In Progress: Webmaker Discourse is live at https://discourse.webmaker.org/, Science staging server is up.

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: Will be using Nagios. Need to write checks and config for Nagios, and then deploy the NPRE agent to servers. Logan to help with configuration.

Community Hosting (@Tanner, @Yousef)
  • Got AWS access this week. I haven’t even had the time to open the creds yet though.
  • Audit
    • 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 To Do: Need to document existing communities and hosting in JIRA
  • MVP
    • Minimum viable product - we want to identify a template for community sites that can be used by new communities just getting started, or that can be put up if a community loses momentum - rather than taking the site down altogether.
    • Status Blocked:  Michael Buluma has started work on defining a MVP (minimum viable product) for a community website. Submitted related MozFest proposal, waiting to hear if it is accepted.
  • Migration to Mesosphere
    • We will be moving away from OVH to simplify community hosting and save money
    • Status In Progress: Got AWS access from Part Infra.  Tasos said that he’ll get the mesos/mesosphere documentation to us today (Wednesday)
  • Migration to AWS
    • Some sites can’t wait for Mesosphere to be ready, and need to be moved to AWS right away, then be moved again once Mesosphere is up and running
    • Status In Progress: Have identified the sites that need to be moved to AWS. Need to sort out what access David needs to help. Also start writing ansible playbooks.

Documentation (@Kensie)
  • Discourse documentation (see above)
  • Wiki update (@buluma_michael )
  • Confluence (@Kensie)
    • Links to JIRA, will use it to help with project management, decision tracking. 
    • Status In Progress: Kensie joined local Atlassian user group to network for mentoring and expertise, meet-up is next week.

Matrix (@leo)
MozFest Participation (@Kensie)
  • We are looking at ways our team can support MozFest, and planning session proposals that would be interesting to MozFest
  • Online Forum for Participants (@Tanner)
    • We are offering our services to host a Discourse instance for MozFest
    • Status In Progress: Configuring Discourse for testing, changing settings, populating demo content.
  • Session Proposals (@Kensie)
    • Status Done!: Sessions have been proposed, now to see if any/which get accepted!

Meet-up (@Kensie)
  • Since most of us are in the UK, we’ll stay a couple extra days after MozFest to meet as a team.
    • Status In Progress: Travel is going to be arranged with the rest of the MozFest travel. Need to start hacking on an agenda.

Contribution Opportunities
Recap of contribution opportunities from status updates and ongoing contribution opportunities:
  • Discourse
    • Research/coding customizations
      • Ruby on Rails (server side/back end)
      • EmberJS (client side/front end)
    • Documenting how to use Discourse/need questions to answer
  • Monitoring
    • Nagios experts/mentors welcome
  • Community Hosting
    • Research MVP for community sites
  • Documentation
    • Discourse (see above)
    • Atlassian experts welcome to help with Confluence/JIRA organization



Sorry this was late, I didn’t do it during a meeting, and then it fell off my radar :-\