Eric Evans

Tags	Architecture, Infrastructure, Strategy
Primary Session	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture
Secondary Sessions

More than just servers

A modern approach to tooling and infrastructure is needed, not only so that we may scale future content and users, but the deployment of new technologies and services as well.

Our way of approaching infrastructure is in need of modernization; What we do we do well, but if we are to grow our capacity, not just for storing and serving content, but our capacity to create the technologies that empower movement strategies, we need a departure from the idea of infrastructre as merely clusters of servers. We need high-level, easily consumed platforms for computation, storage, deployment, and management. We need environments that make experiments cheap, and allow teams to fail-fast or iterate on the next stage quickly. We need systems that are distributed by nature, self-service, secure, and that are able to provide insight into availability and performance.

Some efforts have been (or are being) made here. Examples include recent work toward a Kubernetes deployment, a change-propagation service, and RESTBase. These efforts, while worthwhile, are piecemeal, and no holistic strategy exists. It is my belief that as we discuss the future of our platform, we should consider the requirements in the context of the bigger picture, and discuss a strategy aimed at modernizing our infrastructure.