| --- |
| layout: post |
| status: PUBLISHED |
| published: true |
| title: Promoting Podlings |
| excerpt: How taking time to sharpen the saw saves time for Infra, projects, and the |
| whole ASF |
| id: 33e89bf8-1668-422c-8bee-750b8b18f0d2 |
| date: '2020-07-15 13:29:54 -0400' |
| categories: infra |
| tags: |
| - automation |
| - process |
| permalink: infra/entry/promoting-podlings |
| --- |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">The Infrastructure<br /> |
| team is constantly looking for ways to do its work more quickly while<br /> |
| maintaining the ASF standards of reliability, security, and<br /> |
| almost-continuous availability. The more the team can speed up and<br /> |
| improve standard processes that almost every project goes through,<br /> |
| the better it is for the whole community.<br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> As an example,<br /> |
| when a project starts out with the ASF, it normally begins as a<br /> |
| “podling” in the ASF incubator. Here it can start to create its<br /> |
| code, standard practices, and work methods in a development sandbox.</p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> Once the project<br /> |
| develops a large-enough community of committers and contributors, and<br /> |
| seems to be viable, it can request promotion to top-level-project<br /> |
| (TLP) status. This is a great moment for the project and for the ASF,<br /> |
| but it also used to involve a considerable amount of work for Infra.<br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> Infra Administrator<br /> |
| Greg Stein recalls that, at the beginning, the promotion “process”<br /> |
| was no more than a checklist of about thirty “fiddly steps”, each<br /> |
| of which required someone to do one or several manual tasks during<br /> |
| which any number of things could go wrong. It was considered great<br /> |
| progress when the checklist reduced to twenty manual steps.<br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> Significant<br /> |
| improvements included simplifications of tasks related to mailing<br /> |
| lists in 2010 and LDAP simplifications in 2016, but even as recently<br /> |
| as 2017 the promotion process involved an Infra team member’s<br /> |
| engagement in many steps over the course of two or three hours. This<br /> |
| is what each component required for the promotion of Apache Ranger<br /> |
| that year:<br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"><br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> |
| <a href="https://blogs.apache.org/infra/mediaresource/2fbf5326-1e4b-4dfa-a565-f81fb3028357"><img src="https://blogs.apache.org/infra/mediaresource/2fbf5326-1e4b-4dfa-a565-f81fb3028357?t=true" alt="promote2017.png" style="width: 25%;"></a><br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"><br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Between then and now<br /> |
| the team has improved automation of the various steps, especially<br /> |
| with the introduction of <a href="https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/git+-+.asf.yaml+features" target="_blank">asf.yaml</a> configuration files to simplify publishing project websites. In<br /> |
| 2020 the same promotion process, for Apache ShardingSphere, took a<br /> |
| grand total of <b>four minutes</b>:</p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"><br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"><a href="https://blogs.apache.org/infra/mediaresource/53eb7318-305c-4ace-831e-c0bfd6a679b4"><img src="https://blogs.apache.org/infra/mediaresource/53eb7318-305c-4ace-831e-c0bfd6a679b4?t=true" alt="promote2020.png" style="width: 25%;"></a><br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> |
| <br></p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%">Infra member Daniel<br /> |
| Gruno says, “The majority of the work is just a click of a button<br /> |
| by the ASF secretary nowadays, and then the few remaining bits can<br /> |
| take between five and sixty minutes to complete.” That range<br /> |
| reflects the fact that no two projects have the same profile, system<br /> |
| requirements, and performance expectations.</p> |
| <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 100%"> These improvements<br /> |
| in the podling promotion process are a good reminder of how important<br /> |
| it can be to take the time to “sharpen the saw.”</p> |
