Wikipedia:Wikimedia Cloud Services

Wikimedia Labs
	Wikimedia Labs logo
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Wikimedia community
URL	Wikimedia Labs
Commercial	No
Registration	Required for developers only
Users	1,464+
Launched	June 3, 2011; 12 years ago
Content license	Free license

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Wikimedia Labs (a.k.a. WMFLabs, WikiLabs, Labs) is the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)'s cloud computing environment for developing software for the Foundation's operations. It also hosts bots and tools maintained and used by the community to maintain the foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Labs project is managed from the Wikitech wiki which also hosts technical docs about the foundation's main servers (aka the production environment).

History

Wikimedia Labs was designed to give volunteer software developers a place to write and test software for WMF operations with the goal being to increase the volunteers helping maintain the 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 general public in April 2012.

Overview

The project uses OpenStack 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 an account on Wikimedia Labs, but all software must be released under a free license per mw:Wikimedia Labs/Terms of use. Related help can be found at wikitech:Help:Contents.

Non-operations software

In addition to running software for operations and the infrastructure, Wikimedia Labs also hosts software that helps maintain WMF projects.

Bots

Bots that help maintain WMF projects can be run on the Wikimedia Labs servers. Help for developers may be found at wikitech:Help:Move your bot to Labs. Additional information may be found at wikitech:Nova Resource:Bots and also wikitech:User:Russell Blau/Using pywikibot on Labs.

Tool Labs

Software tools related to maintaining WMF projects can be hosted on the Wikimedia Labs servers. Additional help for developers may be found at wikitech:Nova Resource:Tools/Help.

Migration from Toolserver to Wikimedia Labs

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 setup at wikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found at mw:Wikimedia Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools.

Some users migrated their tools to WMFLabs early, the full-scale migration process began in June 2013 and is expected to be complete by December 2013 with everything completed by June 2014 when items on the toolserver will be deleted. Final decommissioning of the toolserver is tentatively scheduled to be complete by December 2014.

See also

Help

The list of team members that run Wikimedia Labs can be found at mw:Wikimedia Engineering/2013-14 Goals#Wikimedia Labs. wikitech:Nova Resource:Tools contains a current list of sysadmins for Tools and wikitech:Nova Resource:Bots has the sysadmins for Bots. Developers may get additional help at:

#wikimedia-labs ^connect IRC channel on Freenode
Wikimedia Labs maillist archives at mail:Labs-l

Operational status

The operational status of Wikimedia Labs can be found at the following;

Database replication lag

db replag