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 Wikimedia Cloud Services logo | |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
|---|---|
| Created by | Wikimedia community |
| URL | wmcloud |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Required for developers only |
| Users | 1,464+ |
| Launched | June 3, 2011; 14 years ago (2011-06-03) |
Content license | Free license |
Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS) (formerly known asWMFLabs or Labs) is a flexible computing ecosystem built onOpenStack andKubernetes. The project empowers technical contribution to the Wikimedia software world. The products and resources of the WMCS project are available for use by anyone connected with theWikimedia movement. Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by aWikimedia Foundation team andWikimedia movement volunteers.More information about WMCS products and services can be found from theWikitech wiki, which also hosts technical docs about the Foundation's main servers (aka theproduction environment).
Anybody is allowed tocreate a Wikimedia developer account which can be used to request access to Toolforge or Cloud VPS, but all software must be released under a free license perwikitech:Wikitech:Cloud Services Terms of use. Related help can be found atwikitech:Help:Cloud VPS andwikitech:Help:Toolforge, respectively.
Cloud VPS provides collaboratively-owned collections of virtual private servers where users develop and maintain software projects that help the Wikimedia movement.
Software tools, including scripts and bots related to maintaining WMF projects, can be hosted on the Wikimedia Toolforge servers. Additional help for developers may be found atwikitech:Help:Toolforge. A complete listing of tools can be found atToolforge:admin/tools, and a more detailed list of some of them attoolforge:hay/directory.
Data Services is a collection of products, including private-information-redacted copies of Wikimedia's production wiki databases, and access toWikimedia Dumps.
The list of team members that run Wikimedia Cloud Services can be found atmw:Wikimedia Cloud Services team. A list of sysadmins for Toolforge is available attoolforge:openstack-browser/project/tools. Developers may get additional help at:
Wikimedia Cloud Services was designed to give volunteer software developers a place to write and test software for WMF operations, with the goal of increasing volunteers' ability to help maintain WMF's infrastructure. It was opened for beta testing to a limited number of users in October 2011. After several months of testing, the service was opened to the public in April 2012.
Wikimedia Cloud Services included two main branches, initially namedWikimedia Labs andTool Labs. The latter was meant to provide a replacement for theWikimedia Toolserver, which had been hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland.
In February 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation contractedMarc-André Pelletier to provide assistance to tool/bot authors in migrating their tools and bots to the Wikimedia Labs' servers. A help page for migrating has been set up atwikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found atmw:Wikimedia Labs/Tool Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools.
Some users tested the migration process by transferring their tools to WMF Labs early. The full-scale migration process began in June 2013, and was expected to be complete by December 2013. By June 2014, items on the Toolserver would be deleted. The final decommissioning of the Toolserver was on July 1, 2014.
In 2017,Wikimedia Labs wasrenamed toWikimedia Cloud VPS, andTool Labs was renamed toToolforge. This was to remove the ambiguity, and to clarify their purposes.