Help:At a glance: Cloud VPS and Toolforge

Overview

Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS) provides tools, services, and support for technical collaborators who want to contribute to Wikimedia software projects.

This page is intended to answer common questions about our Wikimedia Cloud VPS ( or Cloud VPS) and Toolforge products.

For a brief overview of Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS), our products and services, see the introduction page.

Terminology

This page uses a number of terms, which are specific to Toolforge and Cloud VPS. Please see the terminology page for more detailed definitions.

For questions not covered by this page

If you have additional questions, which are not covered by this page, please reach out to us!

Cloud VPS

What is Cloud VPS?

Wikimedia Cloud VPS (or Cloud VPS) is a cloud computing infrastructure powered by OpenStack for projects related to the Wikimedia movement. Volunteer contributors can use this infrastructure to create and maintain open source software projects.

Cloud VPS is for the volunteers to get involved in Wikimedia operations and software development. Cloud VPS contains many projects, each of which uses one or more instances. Toolforge is one of the most important projects in Wikimedia Cloud VPS.

How is Cloud VPS organized?

Cloud VPS is divided into projects. Each project has separate members and administrators who can create and maintain virtual machines ("instances") for use by that project. Each project can have own its own access policies, DNS records, etc.

What is a Cloud VPS project?

A project is a unit of privilege separation inside the Cloud VPS environment. Each project has separate management of membership, virtual machines, HTTPS proxies, firewall rules, etc. Examples of projects include Toolforge and the Beta Cluster.

How does Cloud VPS work?

Cloud VPS is a virtualization cluster and hosts various virtual machines (called instances) using OpenStack Compute. This is slightly different from your normal servers that you ssh to (i.e. Toolserver), as virtual machines do not exist physically, but reside inside a much bigger machine called the host machine. More details about the physical setup of Cloud VPS can be found under Portal:Cloud_VPS/Infrastructure.

Toolforge

What is Toolforge?

Toolforge is one of the projects hosted by Wikimedia Cloud VPS. The Toolforge administrators manage a pool of virtual servers that provide a shared project hosting environment that can be used by Toolforge users. These resources include web servers, databases and other data storage, and a distributed job processing system. These services provide a reliable and scalable hosting environment for volunteers to develop and operate their tools and bots.

Users of the Toolforge project create "tool" accounts (technically service groups) which allow one or more users to collaborate to manage the software source code, configuration, and jobs for that tool or bot.

For additional documentation and help with Toolforge, see Portal:Toolforge.

What is the difference between Cloud VPS and Toolforge?

Cloud VPS is an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. It provides virtual machines, storage, firewall, and HTTPS proxy resources to projects. The members of each individual project are responsible for managing applications, data, runtime, middleware, and operating systems themselves.

Toolforge is a Platform as a service (PaaS) solution. It provides web servers, databases and other data storage, and a distributed job processing system as managed services that can be used by tools and their maintainers.

Communication and support

Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation Cloud Services team and Wikimedia Movement volunteers. Please reach out with questions and join the conversation:

Discuss and receive general support

• Chat in real time in the IRC channel #wikimedia-cloud ^connect, the bridged Telegram group, or the bridged Mattermost channel
• Discuss via email after you subscribed to the cloud@ mailing list

Receive mail announcements about critical changes

Subscribe to the cloud-announce@ mailing list (all messages are also mirrored to the cloud@ list)

Track work tasks and report bugs

Use a subproject of the #Cloud-Services Phabricator project to track confirmed bug reports and feature requests about the Cloud Services infrastructure itself

Learn about major near-term plans

Read the News wiki page

Read news and stories about Wikimedia Cloud Services

Read the Cloud Services Blog (for the broader Wikimedia movement, see the Wikimedia Technical Blog)