User:Triciaburmeister/Sandbox/Develop on Cloud
 | Final version of this draft is now published at Help:Cloud_VPS. |
Cloud VPS (Virtual Private Server) provides a cloud computing infrastructure powered by OpenStack for projects related to the Wikimedia movement. This page is for Cloud VPS users; for internal documentation, see Portal:Cloud_VPS/Admin.
Cloud VPS features
Cloud VPS (Virtual Private Server) provides the following features for open source projects that support the Wikimedia movement:
- free cloud computing environment, powered by OpenStack,
- collaboratively-owned collections of virtual private servers, storage, firewall, and HTTPS proxy resources to projects,
- access to a variety of data services,
- freedom to install packages not provided by Debian or the Wikimedia Foundation.
Is Cloud VPS right for you?
Cloud VPS is meant to make it easier for developers and system administrators to try out improvements to Wikimedia infrastructure (including MediaWiki), power research and analytics, and host projects that are not viable in the Toolforge environment. Cloud VPS is an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. It provides virtual machines, storage, firewall, and HTTPS proxy resources to projects. The members of each individual project are responsible for managing applications, data, runtime, middleware, and operating systems themselves.
At the moment Debian is the only available operating system since it's a reliable and stable GNU/Linux distribution.
To use Cloud VPS, you need:
- An open source project that isn't viable in the Toolforge environment, or can't be accomplished using other WMCS offerings,
- One or more active project maintainers who meet basic requirements
- Advanced programming knowledge
- Advanced experience with Unix command line
- The ability to administer your own servers and manage your project's applications, data, runtime, middleware, and operating systems.
Consider Toolforge first
To use Cloud VPS, you must be working on an open source project that serves the Wikimedia projects and isn't viable in the Toolforge environment. Toolforge is a Platform as a service (PaaS) solution. Toolforge provides the following features as managed services that can be used by tools and their maintainers:
- free, reliable, and scalable shared hosting (platform as a service), including web servers, databases and other data storage,
- a distributed job processing system,
- support for multiple users to collaboratively manage software source code, configuration, and jobs for a tool or bot.
Terms and Conditions
Account Holders who plan to use WMCS resources and products must read and agree to the following:
- Wikimedia Cloud Services Terms of Use
- Code of Conduct for technical spaces
- Cloud VPS projects must not collect, store, or share private data or personally identifiable information, such as user names, passwords, or IP addresses, except when complying with the conditions listed in the Wikimedia Cloud Services Terms of Use.
- Virtual machines running on Cloud VPS are subject to the instance lifecycle.
Get started
Request a new Cloud VPS Project
To request a Cloud VPS Project, you will need to create a new project request on Phabricator, the Wikimedia community's technical project management tool. A Wikimedia developer account is required. Please read our guidelines for project requests before requesting a project.
Join an existing project
- Choose a project to join with OpenStack browser.
- Request membership by creating a Phabricator task and assigning it directly to the project administrator(s).
- You can find the list of project admins by going to https://openstack-browser.toolforge.org/project/<project-name>.