Catalyst/Updates/2024-09-13

Introduction

Project Catalyst is a team working on a kubernetes cluster as a service explicitly for CI and and exploratory testing. Our current effort is upgrading Patch Demo, to use kubernetes to provision and host wikis with custom extensions and skins. The Catalyst API wraps a small kubernetes cluster. A new instance of Patch Demo will consume this API. Our next effort will be to open the Catalyst API for more general workloads include wikis which rely on (micro)services.

Update

• Status: On Track
• Progress update on the hypothesis for the week
  • phab:T373917 fixed up low disk space on kubernetes cluster
    • unfortunately this involved unschedule downtime, see note on 3 hour downtime below
  • phab:T373604 MR for enabling most extensions and all skins on the Catalyst backend for Patchdemo
  • met with Abstract Wikipedia team to coordinate getting their test environments onto Catalyst
    • next quarter, goal is to spin up per-merge-request test environments for the Function Orchestrator and Function Evaluator
• Any new metrics related to the hypothesis
  • no
• Any emerging blockers or risks
  • we were slowed down on Tuesday by a roughly 3 hour downtime
    • root cause was that the kubernetes cluster ran out disk space
    • further complications emerged when removing and resizing volumes
      • we removed a volume on Horizon to make room to resize another volume, and recreated a (smaller) volume, and attached it to the VM
      • because /etc/fstab was configured to take a disk UUID, it failed to mount and thus failed to boot
      • CloudVPS had to change our /etc/fstab on the unbootable instance before we could fix the problem
• Any unresolved dependencies - do you depend on another team that hasn’t already given you what you need? Are you on the hook to give another team something you aren’t able to give right now?
  • no
• Have there been any new lessons from the hypothesis?
  • no new lessons
• Have there been any changes to the hypothesis scope or timeline?
  • we will begin our engagement with Abstract Wikipedia for per-MR test environments in earnest at the beginning of Q2 (October)