Cross-project-council: [MEETING] Infra-wg Open Discussion

[jorydotcom]

Per our last CPC meeting, we decided that a separate session to move some #infra issues forward would be ideal. We opened a doodle poll and the date chosen is:

Monday, August 26
18:00-19:00 UTC

Join with this zoom info:

Topic: infra-wg meeting
Time: Aug 26, 2019 02:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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Suggested Agenda

1. Scoping - a crack at decomposing the problem
   
   
   
   • Individual Project Infra Support Needs - how do we help projects upgrade, decommission, migrate infra for builds/releases etc...
   
   
   • Foundation-wide concerns - what do we provide for projects vs. what projects own on their own, eliminating bus factors, etc
   
   
   • Infra Sustainability - need a responsive infra support system
   
   
2. Current, related issues
   
   
   
   • jQuery Legacy Infra (#285)
   
   
   • Rethink Found. Infra & how we manage it (#291)
   
   
3. Easy next steps
   
   
   
   • what can we start doing to make progress on the live issues today?
   
   

[Trott]

I'm almost certainly going to miss this meeting today, but hopefully @mhdawson, @rvagg, or someone else from @nodejs/build can be there. Rod and Michael are vastly more knowledgable about this stuff anyway.

Will a recording be available after-the-fact?

[mhdawson]

I plan to be there :)

[jorydotcom]

@Trott good idea, I'll record it!

[kborchers]

I will unfortunately miss this meeting today due to a conflict. I would very much appreciate the recording and any issues or other action items that I can chime in on after the fact.

[jorydotcom]

Going to start this uploading to YouTube, but here's a link to the Zoom recording for the eager.

In attendance: @mhdawson @brianwarner @sendilkumarn @christian-bromann @MylesBorins Wes Todd, @jorydotcom @joesepi (please add yourself if I accidentally missed you)

discussion recap & action items:

We found three areas we can focus on:

1. Identifying common needs across projects
2. How we can make it easy for volunteers to help
3. What are the 'first services' the foundation will offer

Relating to Common Needs, we identified a few categories of infra support projects may need/want:

• Website
• DNS (+ Certs)
• Source Control
• Build
• VMs/test devices
• Distribution
• Monitoring
• Credential Storage & Sharing
• Email
• Additional Comms (Slack, Zoom, etc)

We discussed gathering additional data about what projects are using, and what they are relying on, in each of these categories. It's possible that data can be gathered by survey or during the onboarding process. We also discussed gathering this data/asking these questions across the categories specifically so make the conversation more manageable.

An action item is that @jorydotcom and @brianwarner will organize a data-gathering process for something fairly simple, like certs, to get started.

Relating to 'First Services,' we identified that the foundation has some infra offerings for projects, but that those aren't necessarily known or well understood by the projects. As an action item, @jorydotcom and @brianwarner will collaborate on some documentation and send it around to the group for review and questions.

We did not plan an immediate next meeting - the objective is to review the document and initial data before scheduling a next call.

---

Please add any additional comments or thoughts/threads I may have missed if you were at the meeting today; I want to make sure we captured everything.

[Trott]

Relating to Common Needs, we identified a few categories of infra support projects may need/want:

• Website
• DNS (+ Certs)
• Source Control
• Build
• VMs/test devices
• Distribution
• Monitoring
• Credential Storage & Sharing
• Email
• Additional Comms (Slack, Zoom, etc)

Listening to the recording right now, but the one question from reading the notes: Is CI/CD hidden in that list above somewhere? (Maybe "Build?" Or "VMs/test devices"?) Or is that kind of a Node.js-specific need and everyone else just uses Travis or whatever?

[sendilkumarn]

@jorydotcom (from my notes) I think we also briefly touched up on how we will be differentiating the contractors (I'm not too sure on how to define them "those who have access") and volunteers (those who want to help).

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VMs/test devices

I think this will be a separate item and CI/CD will be a separate item

Relating to 'First Services,' we identified that the foundation has some infra offerings for projects,

IMO, the major problem w.r.t smaller projects are that they do not have a proper communication channel when they scale. Slack is great and awesome but the open source version doesn't scale very well. Providing them a workspace in Slack would be really great.

gathering this data/asking these questions across the categories

It will be really awesome, if someone checks out how different projects handle infra-related things and also what are the major concerns that they have w.r.t infra? Based on that we can split the list into nice to have, should have, etc., I think that will really help us how to phase things here.

Thanks @jorydotcom for arranging the call 👍

[jorydotcom]

@Trott we were implicitly folding CI/CD into the build category, but I think it's worth calling that out specifically. A lot of the other projects use Travis but we shouldn't assume that works for everyone!

And all, here's a link to the meeting on youtube

[mhdawson]

I'd assumed CI/CD would be part of build (if not all of it:))

[jorydotcom]

Following up on the action items from this meeting, @brianwarner and I have reached version 1 draft documentation of the services menu and data gathering. I think it makes sense to close this issue and open a new one to review these items. Please feel free to reopen if you feel otherwise!