jbenet
commented
7 years ago Re: the Planning Call
Hey Everyone,
I'm sorry for missing the planning call. I should've been there. I've been overwhelmed with other work and failed to wake up-- i'm sorry. That said, I don't think the lack of my presence is the reason for the issues here. Faults like that will happen and we need to be fault-tolerant and proceed through them.
The bigger issue here -- and why the call went the way it went -- is that, collectively, we had dropped this thing, and we don't really know what we're doing. We have not taken the time to craft product, nor synthesize all the available comments into a coherent product. (Product Development).
The PMing role -- which often involves that Product Development or at least surfacing and synthesizing others' work -- fell to @whyrusleeping late in the game, who has also been extremely busy with other things and has not had the time required to do greatly here. The result is that the call ended up with fishing for things vaguely related to do, and the action plan is very far away from the original goals set for this sprint in early January. We also need @whyrusleeping tech-leading here, which is a hard and time-consuming role. I voiced this a few days ago: I doubt that Tech-leading, being one of the lead Implementors, Project Managing, AND Product Developing, is a feasible thing, if we want this sprint to be successful. As amazing as @whyrusleeping is, there's just not enough hours in a day. (thoughts @whyrusleeping?)
Product Development
As the person who called this sprint into being, I was the de facto product owner. But this was not quite explicit, and I did not have the time to do the product development necessary. Regardless, I should've either found someone else or do it. So I dropped that ball, which I wasn't even aware I was dropping until a couple days ago.
Here are a bunch of threads relevant to this product (thanks to everyone who surfaced these, or contributed thoughts):
- https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/202 -- the issue that surfaced the need for the test lab
- https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/211 -- a set of tests we want to run
- https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/191 -- a description of a tool to help test ipfs
- https://github.com/ipfs/test-lab/issues/1#issuecomment-281924066 -- a description of user desires / user stories
- https://github.com/ipfs/test-lab/issues/1#issuecomment-282492765 -- same as above
- https://github.com/ipfs/infrastructure/issues/99
- https://github.com/ipfs/infrastructure/issues/100
- Inspiration: https://build.golang.org/
And then there is the vision & goals for the "InterPlanetary Lab" (what this sprint is here for), which i've discussed with many people in this sprint, but has not yet been written up. (For those familiar with Planet Lab, imagine: Planet Lab for IPFS, with all sort of hardware around the world.
The goals I had for this sprint were:
- Make the first working version of IPLab or IPTL (let's go with IPTL henceforth...)
- This would involve:
- a cluster / process orchestrator that can deal with hundreds of machines coming and going
- a container (or similar isolation + deployment tech) engine to deploy arbitrary programs
- a volunteer hardware base (like https://build.golang.org)
- yes, we can surely involve cloud machines and simulated networks too
- a way to issue "interesting workload" tests to the network:
- that get run, parameters then get permuted
- and when they finish, all the data is gathered and returned to me automatically.
- lots of metrics, viz, and access to logs would tell us what all the things we need to fix
- Make dashboards / UIs that let us interact with the lab to make the most of it
Product Development, Actually
So I went ahead and finally did some of the product development required for this sprint. I made a designdoc like thing, and a video discussing it. it's here:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giQfhypeo7g <--- watch at 1.5x -- it's 1hr. and i was rambly
- Slides also here: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWHHppDw9jLcdr4T1jEfH91zt8QjUxS7EoviKe7HAihvK/
This is not everything we need, of course. We still need tighter connection to user stories. Still, I would like people in this sprint to:
- watch this and consider what building this would take.
- think whether this would satisfy the user stories you've been thinking about
- think about the roadmap at the end of the video
- join a discussion today (as the last call of the day) to figure this out. (planning redux, sorry)
IF we decide to go for it, we can:
- flesh out what's on that video into github issues / user stories
- figure out what we can accomplish in 2 weeks (i think we can get to the "usable" milestone at least)
- allocate our teams such that we can parallelize a lot of those (it divides well):
- LabManager (Kubernetes, infra, some go work) -- @lgierth @frankpetrilli @victorbjelkholm
- Lablet/Miner (Kubernetes client, golang, making VMs) -- @whyrusleeping @frankpetrilli @lgierth @kubuxu
- Client (issuing jobs, format and tooling work) -- @victorbjelkholm @jbenet @whyrusleeping @kubuxu
- Dashboards (frontend UI on top of simple APIs) -- @haadcode @victorbjelkholm @dignifiedquire
- Documentation (writing guides for users) -- @flyingzumwalt @sidharder leading @everyone ?
Other options
Taking stock of our options, two others appear:
- (1) Finish the CI/CD work. This work is vaguely related, so it's already invading this sprint. To be clear, if we do this, this IS NOT the test-lab. What's written here so far does not satisfy original goals for test lab: https://github.com/ipfs/test-lab/issues/5#issue-210146814
- (2) We could punt the test-lab to Q2 and work closely with OpenBazaar to build a number of improvements we and they want. (eg IPNS improvements, pubsub routing -- also great for all the VR use cases, libp2p improvements, relay, teach bitswap about graphs, etc...)
I may be ok to do (2) if we decide not to do the proper test lab.
But I think we should go for the test lab. It's incredibly important for the continued success of everything we're doing, and it's going to level up our tech dramatically. If we do it, I can commit to a daily standup (except Thursday) and to guiding the Product Development, if @whyrusleeping can handle big part of the Lablet implementation & Tech Leading (making sure everyone can do what they need to do, and guiding people through the implementation), someone else (@victorbjelkholm maybe, since we had discussed it as a possibility?) could handle the Project Management.
SidHarder
InterPlanetary Test Lab Planning Call
Video recording of the call
Participants
Goal
Jenkins works reliably for standard go-ipfs CI
Infrastructure + code in place for large scale network tests
Kubernetes deployed and able to run tests based on commits
Actionables: