2020 has seen a lot of changes for everyone—understatement of the year right? One of these changes has been how the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team has decided to adjust how they work. We are on an agile workflow journey. We began this year with quarterly planning, for the first time ever! We kicked off the start of the year working on some prioritised initiatives that we discussed as a review team during our first quarterly planning session. The review team included Brian ‘Bex’ Exelbierd, Paul Frields, Jim Perrin, Leigh Griffin, Pierre-Yves Chibon, Brian Stinson and Clément Verna.

The initiatives chosen to be worked on during Quarter One were:

  • FAS Replacement Login Phase 1 
  • Fedora Data Centre Move
  • CentOS Stream Phase 1 
  • CI/CD 

The team agreed that the CPE would work on these from January–March 2020 as well as resourcing our sustaining team to support “lights on” work and Fedora & CentOS releases. 

And let us be the first to tell you, while it did not seem like it would be a monumental change from the outside from switching to scheduling our work in advance rather than responding to ‘fire fire fire!’, it has been tricky to adjust to but we are getting there!

We had a Q1 celebration call hosted by our Agile Practitioner Sarah Finn to highlight the successes we achieved in that timeframe, and we were all a little surprised and a lot pleased with what we accomplished as a team

So, what did we achieve in this time?

CPE Sustaining team 

Team members: Clément Verna, Kevin Fenzi, Stephen Smoogen, Mohan Boddu, Michal Konecny, Vipul Siddharth, Tomas Hrcka, Petr Bokoc along with support from wider CPE Team/Red Hat/community as required.

Achievements

  • Preparation for Data Center Move (Archives, Old Cloud retirement, Communication to Community)
  • Applications Update (Bodhi, Anitya, mdapi, compose-tracker, fedscm-admin, python-cicoclient, …)
  • Fedora 32 Beta release infra and releng support
  • CentOS CI (Update of images used to run tests for Fedora)
  • Mbbox project start (Requirements, PoC, Dev Environment)

User Benefits

  • Fedora 32 Beta release
  • It is not too difficult to contribute to Fedora!

FAS Replacement Login Phase 1

Team members: Aoife Moloney, Aurelien Bompard, Rick Elrod (Jan- Feb), Ryan Lerch, Stephen Coady, James Richardson, Leonardo Rossetti along with support from wider CPE Team/Red Hat/community as required.

Achievements

  • Registration page, user profile, user settings, user groups, groups list
  • 2FA & OTP authentication working
  • Fedora messaging is integrated
  • Users can reset their password when they have forgotten it
  • The FASJSON API is versioned and follows an OpenAPI spec
  • Theming support, with a Fedora and an OpenSUSE theme

Fedora Data Centre Move

Team members: Aoife Moloney, Stephen Smoogen, Kevin Fenzi along with support from wider CPE Team/Red Hat/community as required.

Achievements

  • Minimum Viable Fedora offering defined
  • secured space in the IAD2 datacentre for any future growth in Fedora infrastructure
  • COPR backups upgraded
  • Hardware budget approved and purchased 
  • Hardware inventory updated
  • Full Move schedule created and published
  • Impacted services list created and published

User Benefits

  • Red Hat bought us some new stuff
  • New datacenter will provide better access to large cloud providers, and thus Fedora users using those providers.
  • Refreshed hardware should allow Fedora Infrastructure to meet growth needs for this year and beyond.
  • Planning and work should ensure outages for the datacenter move are as short as possible.

CentOS Stream Phase 1

Team members: Aoife Moloney, Brian Stinson, Fabian Arrotin, Johnny Hughes, James Antill, Carl George, Siteshwar Vashisht along with support from wider CPE Team/Red Hat/community as required.

Achievements

  • Account creation in git.centos.org for Stream
  • Regular compose created & merged
  • Nightly composes running
  • Testing & QA suite running
  • List of packages available in Stream
  • Modules added to Stream
  • RPM signing tool written & implemented for CBS content in Stream
  • Workflow for contributor patches enabled
  • Stream is ahead of RHEL 8.1

User Benefits

  • CentOS Stream releases ship like a tree and has nightly composes
  • Stream accounts are available on git.stg.centos.org
  • QA and testing in Stream are finding issues quicker than in RHEL and CentOS Linux
  • 240+ packages are now available in Stream
  • There is a new signing tool written for CBS content

CI/CD

Team members: Aoife Moloney, Pierre-Yves Chibon, Nils Philippsen, Adam Saleh along with support from wider CPE Team/Red Hat/community as required.

Achievements

User Benefits

  • A backlog of ideas in the Fedora Infra and releng ecosystems can tackle to increase automation
  • The packager workflow is now monitored regularly and automatically. This will give us a way to measure the health of the packager workflow and in the long term potentially figure out the least reliable parts to improve them
  • Removing the changelogs and release fields from spec files allows for more automation around spec files and removes the two major sources of conflicts when doing pull-request on dist-git. This can be tested today in staging, allowing to gather more user feedback and experience before deciding on proceeding with this or not.

Coming next quarter

We have now had our second quarterly planning session for Q2, April – June, and if you want to check out what we are working on, stop by our Taiga board to see our ‘in progress’ lane and read our blog post here. If you any questions regarding anything above or want to give us feedback, please reach out on our #redhat-cpe channel on IRC Freenode or mailing lists. 

And it is part for the course that when changes happen things get missed or overlooked, so this blog post is going out a little later than we would like, but we will try to have your next window wins published by the latest mid-July. We just won’t say what year. 🙂

Thank you everyone for your contributions to the above initiatives in our Q1, we had some great community engagement across our projects and we hope to have the same for the remainder of the year, because some things should never change

Take care everyone and see you around IRC!