Help:Cloud Services introduction
Welcome to Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS)!
WMCS is a flexible computing ecosystem built on OpenStack, GridEngine, and Kubernetes. We empower technical contribution to the Wikimedia software world.
Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by a WMF team and volunteers.
History
WMCS has been known as Wikimedia Labs until March 2nd 2017.
The "Labs" nomenclature became overloaded and often required clarification about what component of the ecosystem was being referred to. The "Labs" team and the Tool Labs Support team have joined forces as the Wikimedia Cloud Services team and are launching a campaign to improve the language and branding surrounding products and services offered.
Eventual final branding and renaming is open for discussion. Working titles are now in use across some documentation. The generic compute/'Labs' environment for running your own virtual instances is being referred to now as VPS and Tool Labs/Tools which is the PaaS environment is now being referred to as Tools Forge.
WMCS Products
- Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for users to develop and maintain projects that help Wikimedia.
- Tools Forge Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment for running bots, webservices, scheduled jobs, and doing analysis
- Data as a Service (DaaS) offerings that include a real-time and sanitized production database replica, and NFS access to Wikimedia Dumps
What Product Should I Use
VPS
If you need to run full virtual instances and are willing to administer them on your own we can provide quota to do so.
Tools Forge PaaS
If you need to run a specific webservice, scheduled job, or perform analysis but do not want to or are not able to manage a full virtual environment this is the best place.
DaaS
We provide replicas of the production databases and other data for analysis and experimentation. DaaS resources are available from both the VPS and the PaaS environments, though some of them may need to be requested for a specific VPS Project.
Discovery
- WMCS is working on a tool for read-only browsing of our projects at OpenStack Browser.
- Project administration is done through the OpenStack dashboard known as Horizon.
- Tools Forge (Tools) has a homepage and a directory of Tools
Joining and Participating
Labs Account Holders are governed by the Labs terms of use and the Rules. The agreement to disclosure of personally identifiable information covers End-Users.
We are on IRC
