Download - OWF14 - Project & Community Driving : Community management of a free software project infrastructure
Who am I ?
Sysadmin @
OSAS Team@ Red Hat
Community nurturing
Infrastructure setup and consulting
Why infrastructure ?
Community tuteur
Enable community to « do stuff »
Free software communityproject infrastructure
Mostly focused on software
Wikipedia
TuxFamily
Free software communityproject infrastructure
In the open
Different types of community
Group of companies ?
Single company + individuals ?
Individuals ?
NGO ?
A mix of this ?
Impact on ressources and needs
Free software communityproject infrastructure
Different size of projects
Small ruby module
Fork of a linux distribution like Mageia
New language like Rust, Go
Impact on tooling
Free software communityproject infrastructure
Personal classification
3 types of infra
Production focused
VCS ( git, hg, svn, etc)
Continous integration
Jenkins, travis, buildbot, etc
Bugtracker
Bugzilla, jira, etc
CDN / Mirrors
Documentation ?
Translation ?
QA ?
Specific tooling
Security update
Build systems
Package/binary signing
Infrastructure focused
Monitoring
Backups
Configuration management
Communication focused
Internal
Mailling lists
IRC
External
Website
Social media
Best practices
Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more ; si fueris alibi vivito sicut ibi
Follow the rest of the ecosystem
Java projects on jira ?
Python go to bitbucket and mercurial
Etc, etc
Ease recruiting project members
Tooling around the default location
More is not better
IRC + XMPP + Forum + ML + Usenet + etc
Too much choice
Requires ressources
Sysadmin ressources
Communication ressources
Make communication harder
Harder to communicate culture
... especially when the current hot topic is
inclusiveness
What type of communication ?
« Customer services »
Project work related topic
General community chat
Differents needs
Latency expectation
Formatting ?
Need for moderation and archiving
Ressources needed
Technical level to use
Unspoken assumptions and conventions
Authentication and workflow to communicate
Authentication
Elephant in the room
Major source of confusion @mandriva
People forget their password
People forget their login
No way to track users among the whole project
No global view of permissions
Difficulty to give vanity email domain
Few solutions
No central auth
Easy...
But messy...
Reusing external auth
Github, Twitter, Openid, Persona
Only solve authentication, not authorization
What about non web auth ?
Jenkins, Git, etc
What about mandating 2 FA ?
LDAP
Or similar
More complex
Not always supported
Not supported in the same way everywhere
Requires web interface to manage accounts
Hard to get right
FreeIPA
FedAuth
LDAP + OpenID + Persona
Use external or internal infra ?
Use external
Pros
Easier to start
Permit to outsource maintainance
Improve by itself
Cons
Often proprietary
Not always flexible enough
Can be closed
Can « improve » in way we do not want
Can become a paid offer
Can be blocked in some country
( ask my boss in China about AWS )
Use internal infrastructure
Pro
Full flexibility...
..if you have enough sustained ressources
Integration with any auth
Independant from provider
Cons
Requires people
Requires money/server
Hybrid approach
Use github and your own bugtracker
( private security bug on git hub issues ? )
Going on self hosted
\o/ Yeah \o/
Finding material ressources
Money from companies
Sponsorship from Cloud offering
Rackspace
OVH
Lost Oasis
Ikoula
Microsoft Azure
Kickstarter, patreon, etc
HP, Dell, IBM, etc
University hosting ?
Geeks working at hosting companies
Growing a community of admins
Quite hard
Need a full time person most of the time
Set of best practices
Clear contact informations
Always aim to grow it
Bus factor > 2 or 3
Automate as much as possible
Usage of configuration management
Only sane way to work in a team as admin
Requires some knowledge from community
Work in the open
Publish configuration
Except passwords
Warn about planned downtime
Publish postmortem
Try to make regular reviews
Can double as learning for newer team members
Write documentation
Fedora SOP
Communicate a lot internally
Going on holiday ?
People on-call ?
Delegate as much as possible
Self service approval process
Reduce bureaucracy
Do not write your ownsoftware
Do say « no »
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