Help:Labs labs labs
Prior to June 2017, there were several different Wikimedia technical projects with "Labs" in their name. Depending on the context, people may have been referring to one of these three (or others). To avoid further confusion, use their proper name.
Nutshell
- Wikimedia Cloud VPS (formerly Wikimedia Labs), a cloud computing infrastructure (maintained by Wikimedia Cloud Services).
- Toolforge (formerly Tool Labs), a platform for web services and bots run by volunteers (maintained by Wikimedia Cloud Services).
- Beta Cluster, a small wiki farm running the latest alpha version of MediaWiki. Sometimes improperly called "Beta labs".
Wikimedia Cloud VPS
Wikimedia Cloud VPS (formerly Wikimedia Labs or Labs) provides cloud computing infrastructure for people doing Wikimedia-related work. The virtual machines are powered by the OpenStack software, administered through Horizon (and historically through special pages on this wiki). The environment also provides auxiliary services, such as shared NFS storage, and access to live replica databases of Wikimedia Foundation wikis.
Toolforge and Beta Cluster are just two of many projects run on virtual machines hosted in Wikimedia Cloud VPS.
See this list of other projects, for other examples.
More information at Portal:Cloud VPS.
Toolforge
Toolforge (formerly Tool Labs) is a platform for volunteers to easily run web services, bots and other applications. Users deploy applications directly onto a shared Grid Engine, and use other shared services (such as Redis). Users have the comfort of not needing to become system administrators of any (virtual) servers or hardware, instead the platform is entirely provided by the Toolforge admin team.
All web applications are served through a subdomain of toolforge.org. Previously tools with web applications were served though https://tools.wmflabs.org. Toolforge supersedes the "Toolserver" previously run by Wikimedia Deutschland.
The Toolforge platform is powered by Wikimedia Cloud VPS, but this aspect is not relevant to its users.
More information at Help:Toolforge.
Beta Cluster
The Beta Cluster is a small wiki farm used to test code changes that affect Wikimedia wikis. It runs the latest alpha version of the MediaWiki software and closely matches the configuration of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.
The main portal is at beta.wmflabs.org, with a beta version of English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org.
It should also not be confused with the following.
- Beta Features, a MediaWiki extension deployed both on live sites and the Beta Cluster for incubating new features.
- Mobile Beta features
This is why one should avoid referring to Beta Cluster as merely "Beta".
The project housing the virtual machines of the Beta Cluster in Wikimedia Cloud VPS is still named "deployment-prep". Unfortunately, renaming that project is not possible at the moment.
More information at Beta Cluster.
Other usage of the term labs
- Wikitech (this wiki) was formerly called "Labs console", due to management software being installed here for Wikimedia Cloud VPS. For the purpose of linking to pages between wikis, labsconsole: is still supported as an interwiki prefix, with the same destination as the wikitech: interwiki prefix.
- Its database is still named
labswiki, because it's difficult to rename databases[1], and thus "Labswiki" is sometimes used to refer to Wikitech wiki.
- Its database is still named
- The database of the former Beta Cluster landing page (deployment.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org) was originally also named
labswiki.[2] - The Grafana installation for WMCS was historically hosted at https://grafana-labs.wikimedia.org/ (see grafana.wikimedia.org#Wikimedia Cloud Services).