Requests for creating or deleting Cloud-VPS projects. See openstack-browser for a list of existing projects and their members. For quota changes see Cloud-VPS (Quota-requests)

Before you request a project

1. Confirm you cannot run your code/bot/thing on Toolforge. You can request access to Toolforge by following the instructions on wikitech. With Toolforge, the underlying infrastructure will be taken care of for you, and you can focus on writing your tool / bot / researchy-thing.

2. Only request a VPS project if you need root on the VM for a specific purpose (or need testing VMs for MediaWiki changes, etc). Remember that if you have root you have responsibilities too! :)

Maintainer responsibilities

Each Cloud VPS project must have one or more active maintainers. Maintainers must have an active Phabricator account, must subscribe to the cloud-announce mailing list, and must respond to tasks, emails, and requests for action on the part of WMCS staff and admins.

In addition, maintainers of VMs in Cloud VPS projects must provide basic maintenance on their servers: puppet needs to be kept in working order, upgrades will need to be applied periodically, and VMs will need to be periodically deleted and recreated with updated OS images.

If a project is not actively maintained, or WMCS staff are unable to contact maintainers for a long period of time, that project will be shut down and ultimately deleted along with all associated configuration and data.

Project scope

Cloud VPS projects should be scoped based around concrete products or software projects, rather than the team working on them. The three main problems that we (the Cloud Services team) have seen in the past with team ownership/scope for Cloud VPS projects are:

• Team gets disbanded/reorganized but its project needs to live on due to hosting of important VMs
• Difficulty establishing who is the primary point of contact for a given VM when trying to reclaim quota or fix a broken instance
• Tendency to close membership/participation to only team members rather than inviting participation by other volunteers

There are things that can be done to mitigate these problems, but the easiest thing to do is to create more targeted projects that are scoped to a product/project rather than a team. This can become a burden in other ways if a common group of developers is active on a large number of such projects, so we are willing to be flexible if good cause can be shown for project consolidation.

For more guidance, see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Cloud_VPS_project

Requesting a new project

To request a new project, create a task using this link, and fill out the requested information by <replacing the instructions>

Note that there's currently some restrictions on the name of the project: it should not contain underscores or special characters, because it will be used in DNS records.

Process

Requests can be granted when approved by a quorum of at least two Cloud VPS administrators. If a decision is not made asynchronously, requests are processed by the cloud-services-team during the Cloud Services team meeting every Thursday (8:00 PST) that the meeting is held. This schedule may be effected by holidays, conferences, or other unavailability.

Once approved, creation of the project in OpenStack will be handled by a member of the Cloud VPS admin team. This will typically happen within 1-2 days, but may take longer due to availability of computing resources or higher priority administration tasks.

See also

• Cloud-VPS (Quota-requests)

In T441738#12538313, @fnegri wrote:

@Etrapani I see that you now have access to the signwriting Cloud VPS project with your developer account Maldauxra. Can this task be resolved?

In T441738#12494796, @taavi wrote:

Have you considered Toolforge following e.g. https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/mwdemo instead?

Declining for now, pending the discussion in T418818: What is recaptime-dev and how does it advance the goals of the Wikimedia movement? and lacking a clear benefit for the Wikimedia movement.

@Etrapani I see that you now have access to the signwriting Cloud VPS project with your developer account Maldauxra. Can this task be resolved?

@CristianCantoro @Bancherx the project deorph-db was created in Cloud VPS, you can create one or more Trove databases in it following the user guide at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Trove_database_user_guide

projects: added project deorph-db

group_199_bot_f98be072172e323ae6d1441939d3e461 opened https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/cloud/cloud-vps/tofu-infra/-/merge_requests/375

In T442348#12529922, @fnegri wrote:

Next week, I will create a deorph-db project in Cloud VPS where the Trove database can be created.

I worked on this during itWikiCon with @CristianCantoro, we have a working prototype running on Toolforge at: https://deorph.toolforge.org/ -- at the moment this is using only two very small wikis (furwiki and cowiki).

In T442348#12523924, @fnegri wrote:

If you're at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ItWikiCon/2026 this weekend we can chat about this in person. :)

@CristianCantoro I think that approach is viable, but I would give Toolforge a try, if the data processing fits in 8GB then I think a job in Toolforge that connects to Trove would be the easy option.

I am wondering if we can split the problem in two:

• the data processing is what requires most resources (CPU, RAM, storage)
• the dashboard itself requires very little resources (in the end it is just retrieving data from a relational DB and visualizing them, we have a part of the tool that does some processing in real-time, but it is a very small thing)

So should we put on hold this request for now while you check if it can run on toolforge?

Hi Volans,
Yes, we should be able to reduce memory usage through refactoring, though we still need to verify whether it fits below 8 GB and measure the performance impact.

Created the project lingua-data-s3 without quota for VMs (--s3-only flag) and increased default quota for object storage to 400GB.
The default quota for number of objects is still the default at 4096 given the comments in the related task about the number of zip files to be in the hundreds.
If more will be needed you can open a task later for the quota increase.
See https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Object_storage_user_guide for how to use it.

projects: added project lingua-data-s3

group_199_bot_f98be072172e323ae6d1441939d3e461 opened https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/cloud/cloud-vps/tofu-infra/-/merge_requests/374

volans closed https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/cloud/cloud-vps/tofu-infra/-/merge_requests/373

volans closed https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/cloud/cloud-vps/tofu-infra/-/merge_requests/372

Based on the discussion on the related task T440689, I'm creating the project as "object storage only" and will add quota for the object storage request in the toolforge related task.

group_199_bot_f98be072172e323ae6d1441939d3e461 opened https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/cloud/cloud-vps/tofu-infra/-/merge_requests/373

group_199_bot_f98be072172e323ae6d1441939d3e461 opened https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/cloud/cloud-vps/tofu-infra/-/merge_requests/372

Thanks both for the details and insights.

Hi Andrew,
we use a rust pipeline with SQLite, C++/fastText, the inputs are official Wikimedia SQL, MediaWiki History and current-content XML dumps. We download and run locally this model.
Our latest collection cover those Wikipedia edition:
vec, lmo, fur, roa-tara, nap, pms, scn, sc, lij, eml, co, lld, it, ca, pt, fr.

Hi Andrew,

Hi @taavi (and anyone else reviewing this) — adding the background on Recap Time Squad and this project here, cross-linked with my reply on T418818.

In T442330#12495002, @taavi wrote:

Hi. I believe T418818: What is recaptime-dev and how does it advance the goals of the Wikimedia movement? needs answering first.

In T440447#12495836, @Volans wrote:

@Yug It's correct to consider this request on hold pending to see if this can run in toolforge as per T440689 ?

@Volans confirmed I got that fixed and we seem to be rolling forward now. :) Closing as invalid.

@Yug It's correct to consider this request on hold pending to see if this can run in toolforge as per T440689 ?

For a starting point: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Toolforge/Rust

On a quick read, I don't see anything here that can't run as a toolforge tool (or possibly a suite of toolforge tools.) Have you already investigated and discarded that option?

Hi. I believe T418818: What is recaptime-dev and how does it advance the goals of the Wikimedia movement? needs answering first.

Have you considered Toolforge following e.g. https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/mwdemo instead?

I'm not sure I fully understand the request. If this is meant to be an extension to be included in MediaWiki, what is the requirements for having VMs? A temporary demo?

@bvibber checking if this is still needed as I've read elsewhere that you might have been able to actually run mediawiki on toolsdb just removing the limitation of the minversion of mariadb.