The most visible product of the Fedora community is the Fedora distribution itself. However, there’s much more to Fedora than its distribution, and underneath it all the Fedora infrastructure keeps things humming along. Without it, we’d have no mailing lists, no Web site, no build systems, packages, or (ultimately) distribution.
Friday morning, Fedora infrastructure lead Kevin Fenzi gave an update on Fedora’s infrastructure and its roadmap for the next year or so.
By the Numbers
A quick look at the numbers shows that Fedora has 460 instances that run a mix of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 (176 instances), RHEL 7 (46 instances), and Fedora 20 (145 instances) spread out around the world in seven data centers.
Of the instances, 79 are managed by Puppet and 381 are managed by Ansible. Only two of the instances are running without SELinux in enabled or permissive mode, and those are set to disabled because they’re used to build projects that (currently) don’t support building under SELinux. (Fenzi says that there is work underway to fix that as well.)
Short Term Plans
In the short term, Fenzi says that infra wants to finish the migration to Ansible away from Puppet, and finish the migration to RHEL 7 away from RHEL 6.
He also says that the plan is to deploy Bodhi 2 "a bit" after Fedora 21 is released (currently targeted for November). The infrastructure team is holding off here to minimize disruption.
Another project on infrastructure’s plate is Anitya, a release monitoring project that’s designed to be used by multiple Linux projects. Fenzi says that infra would like to cooperate with other distros, and that Anitya is "mostly ready to deploy."
In more good news, Fenzi says Hyperkitty is close to production (in the next few weeks) and the plan is to move one test list to Hyperkitty, then another group for more testing, and then migrate all of the other lists. For those who haven’t followed it, Hyperkitty is a next-generation mailing list archiver. Once deployed Hyperkitty should significantly improve the mailing list archives for our mailing lists.
Finally, there are some projects to direct messaging from Bugzilla and the FAS client to the Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus (fedmsg).
Longer Term Plans
All of the work mentioned above is targeted for the next six months (or sooner). Further out than that, the infrastructure team has a number of other interesting projects that will help Fedora users and contributors.
Fenzi says there will be a Fedora Activity Day at some point around MirrorManager and working on its rewrite. That date is not yet set, says Fenzi, and will depend on the availability of current contributors.
MediaWiki, the software that powers the Fedora wiki, is due for an upgrade. Fenzi says Fedora is currently using a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will probably go end of life (EOL) next year. Time to move to 1.23 or later to ensure the project has security updates from upstream.
As noted in Miloslav Suchy’s talk Thursday about Copr, the Fedora infrastructure OpenStack instance is due for an update. Fenzi says that it’s currently on OpenStack Folsom, and will be moving "when it’s ready."
There’s also plans to look at two-factor authentication (TFA) and porting applications to Python 3.
Overall, Fenzi provided a great overview of what infrastructure does and where the team is headed. It’s easy to overlook the enormous contribution that infrastructure makes to Fedora as a project and distribution, so it’s good to hear from the team and see where infrastructure is going!
