2021: New Year, New Teams, New Focus, Same Principles
Introduction to Team Restructuring for 2021

Hello everyone, it's been a while since we last produced a blog post for publication - we've definitely been busy in 2020 but just haven't written about it! Now we are three months into 2021, I thought it would be an opportunity to inform everyone in a more detailed way about Miraheze's technical team restructuring.

Let's start with a brief overview of how Miraheze's Site Reliability Engineering team is structured...

  • Director of Site Reliability Engineering
    • Engineering Manager, Infrastructure
      • A team of Site Reliability Engineers
    • Engineering Manager, MediaWiki
      • A team of MediaWiki Engineers (and Site Reliability Engineers in the future)

What Does the Director of Site Reliability Engineering do?

The Director of Site Reliability Engineering, who is currently @Southparkfan and is appointed by Miraheze Limited's Board of Directors, has overall responsibility and control of Miraheze's technical operations. They are responsible for day-to-day management of Miraheze's technical operation, maintain the budget that we operate on, work with our upstream service providers to ensure regular and uninterrupted service as well as acting as a sound board for large projects members of the team wish to work on.

They are also directly responsible for being the line manager to team Engineering Managers, ensuring their welfare, personal and professional development is considered by the Board of Directors and others. On a day to day basis, they also work under the Infrastructure team's priorities for technical progression.

Infrastructure Team

The Infrastructure team ensures Miraheze's services and servers are fast, reliable and secure. MediaWiki being the key product of Miraheze, Infrastructure is responsible for providing all miscellaneous, yet critical services that make MediaWiki reliable, useful, secure and scalable. Infrastructure develops and maintains the virtual servers, relational databases, media storage, automation tooling, configuration management systems, network, continuous integration and continuous delivery, cache stores and observability platforms.

The team is lead by an Engineering Manager, @John, who was appointed by the Director of Site Reliability Engineering. They ensure appropriate task management for Infrastructure Team tasks, goals are met and kept on track for Infrastructure, the wellbeing and growth of the Infrastructure team and that there is regular cross-collaboration with the MediaWiki Team.

Other members of the team not listed above currently are:

MediaWiki Team

The MediaWiki team is responsible for offering the MediaWiki core platform and MediaWiki extensions. They develop in-house extensions, maintain the latest stable version of MediaWiki core and extensions, handle the configuration and feature requests from the community and work with Wikimedia (upstream) and other third-parties.

The team is lead by an Engineering Manager, @Reception123, who was appointed by the Director of Site Reliability Engineering. They ensure appropriate task management for MediaWiki Team tasks, goals are met and kept on track for MediaWiki, the wellbeing and growth of the MediaWiki team and that there is regular cross-collaboration with the Infrastructure Team.

Other members of the team not listed above currently are:

What Can We Expect in 2021?

Both teams regularly meet to discuss their next projects and actively review on-going work they're conducting. Both Engineering Managers were asked to discuss three projects they would like to work on during 2021 and these were the answers given:

Infrastructure

  • Improving Processes - this is in relation to improving monitoring, logging and menial repetitive tasks to reduce the average time to resolution for incidents, prevent incidents in the first place and free up more time from doing menial tasks such as SSL certificates (T6759)
  • Creating a Robust Disaster Recovery Plan - following on from the recent incident in France, we have had on-going tasks for improving our backups and disaster recovery processes. Over 2021, the Infrastructure team will invest heavily in ensuring we have a plan in place and are able to effective execute it.
  • Cache and Capacity - as Miraheze grows, we need to improve both our caching and our capacity to continue to deliver a fast and reliable service to users.

MediaWiki

  • Community Wishlist - we think it is an interesting idea to have the community provide more feedback to us regarding which improvements they would like to see with our current in-house extensions, but also perhaps to propose new ones altogether.
  • Guaranteed Response on Phabricator - with the advent of ManageWiki there is less need than before for users to interact with Phabricator, but some things still must go through Phabricator, so we would like to give a 48 hour turn around for straightforward Configuration requests and a 7 day turn around for other issues (imports, bug reports, etc.).
  • Increasing Performance and Security - as you know, Miraheze takes security very seriously and also strives to have the best performance possible. There are a few tasks that will further this effort.
Written by John on Mar 14 2021, 15:52.
Engineering Manager, Infrastructure

Event Timeline

Great goals set forward Miraheze. I will be looking forward to improving security and performance.