Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS) (formerly known as WMFLabs or Labs) is a flexible computing ecosystem built on

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pl ...

, GridEngine, and

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

. The project empowers technical contribution to the Wikimedia software world. The products and resources of the WMCS project are available for use by anyone connected with the

Wikimedia movement According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects. This community directly builds and administers the projects. It is committed to using open standards and software. ...

. Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by a Wikimedia Foundation team and

volunteers. The WMCS project is managed from the Wikitech wiki which also hosts technical docs about the Foundation's main servers (aka the ''

production Production may refer to: Economics and business * Production (economics) * Production, the act of manufacturing goods * Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services) * Production as a stati ...

'' environment).

Overview

The project uses

to provide developers with instances to help them debug and test software updates and changes. Each instance is a virtual environment that can be shared with others. This allows developers to test configurations before they are deployed to the production environment.

Access

Anybody is allowed to create a Wikitech account which can be used to request access to Toolforge or Cloud VPS, but all software must be released under a free license per wikitech:Wikitech:Cloud Services Terms of use. Related help can be found at wikitech:Help:Cloud VPS.

Services

Cloud VPS

Cloud VPS provides collaboratively-owned collections of virtual private servers where users develop and maintain software projects that help the Wikimedia movement.

Toolforge

Software tools, including scripts and bots related to maintaining WMF projects, can be hosted on the Wikimedia Toolforge servers. Additional help for developers may be found at wikitech:Help:Toolforge. A complete listing of tools can be found at Toolforge:admin/tools, and a more detailed list of some of them at toolforge:hay/directory.

Data Services

Data Services is a collection of products, including private-information-redacted copies of Wikimedia's production wiki databases, and access to Wikimedia Dumps.

Support and diagnostics

The list of team members that run Wikimedia Cloud Services can be found at mw:Wikimedia Cloud Services team. A list of sysadmins for Toolforge is available at toolforge:openstack-browser/project/tools. Developers may get additional help at: * - IRC channel on

Libera Chat Libera Chat, stylized Libera.Chat, is an IRC network for free and open source software projects. It was founded on 19 May 2021 by former Freenode staff members, after Freenode was taken over by Andrew Lee, founder of Private Internet Access ...

* cloud@lists.wikimedia.org - Wikimedia Cloud Services mailing list archives

Operational status

The operational status of Wikimedia Cloud VPS can be found at the following; * * toolforge:nagf ;Database replication lag * database lag as reported by the heartbeat_p database * db replag

History

''Wikimedia Cloud Services'' was designed to give volunteer software developers a place to write and test software for WMF operations, with the goal of increasing volunteers' ability to help maintain WMF's infrastructure. It was opened for beta testing to a limited number of users in October 2011. After several months of testing, the service was opened to the public in April 2012.

Migration from Toolserver to Wikimedia Cloud Services

Wikimedia Cloud Services included two main branches, initially named ''Wikimedia Labs'' and ''Tool Labs''. The latter was meant to provide a replacement for the Wikimedia Toolserver, which had been hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland. In February 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation contracted Marc-André Pelletier to provide assistance to tool/bot authors in migrating their tools and bots to the Wikimedia Labs' servers. A help page for migrating has been set up at wikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found at mw:Wikimedia Labs/Tool Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools. Some users tested the migration process by transferring their tools to WMF Labs early. The full-scale migration process began in June 2013, and was expected to be complete by December 2013. By June 2014, items on the Toolserver would be deleted. The final decommissioning of the Toolserver was on July 1, 2014. In 2017, ''Wikimedia Labs'' was renamed to ''Wikimedia Cloud VPS'', and ''Tool Labs'' was renamed to ''Toolforge''. This was to remove the ambiguity, and to clarify their purposes. ;See also * WMFblog:2013/05/30/preparing-for-the-migration-from-the-wikimedia-toolserver-to-tool-labs * October 2012 Signpost report * April 2012 Signpost article on Wikimedia Labs * WMFblog:2012/04/16/introduction-to-wikimedia-labs/