Meeting run by pietroalbini. Minutes written by pietroalbini.
Attending: aidanhs, alexcrichton, kennytm, Mark-Simulacrum, pietroalbini, shepmaster

Spurious Chocolatey failures

Since a few days ago, Chocolatey started returning 503 error codes at random, preventing some Windows CI runners from downloading MSYS2, and the tree was closed to prevent the failures from affecting a bunch of PRs. There were a few proposals on how to work around them, spanning from a proper mirroring implementation to just a quick fix to get CI working again.

After the discussion the team agreed to prioritize getting CI working consistently rather than implement the correct solution from the start. aidanhs is going to look into that during the weekend, if nobody else finishes the work before.

Progress on moving the infrastructure to Terraform

In the past few months pietroalbini started exploring moving the configuration of Rust’s AWS infrastructure to Terraform, to allow for better collaboration and auditability. So far a few services have been moved over to Terraform, and pietroalbini proposed in the meeting to evaluate moving dynamic applications over to ECS and configure those with Terraform.

alexcrichton brought up the point that pietroalbini is at the moment the only person in the team familiar with our Terraform setup, and while it’s probably a better solution than the status quo we need more people able to work with it before we decide to fully commit to using it. He acknowledged the current solution (services manually configured through the console) is not scalable nor long term, but we can’t jump to Terraform if most of the team doesn’t know how to work with it.

shepmaster said that this is not much different than the situation in the past, where alexcrichton was the only one knowing how our infrastructure worked (since then other people in the team got up to speed). aidanhs pointed out that we had a case in the past like that, when only alexcrichton knew how a system worked and it broke while he was on holiday.

alexcrichton proposed to pause investing time into Terraform until at least another team member gets familiar with it, and Mark-Simulacrum said he’s willing to pair with pietroalbini for a few hours to migrate one of the services to Terraform, learning how it works in the process.

The feelings about ECS turned up to be mostly the same: everyone agreed it’s surely a better solution than the setup we have right now, but only pietroalbini is familiar with it. We agreed that pietroalbini and Mark-Simulacrum are going to deploy one of the small applications to ECS using Terraform while pairing, testing both the new things in one go.

In the end, pietroalbini reminded the team that not every application we currently host is going to fit into ECS + Fargate without changes, especially because you can’t really persist data on the filesystem with it, but he mentioned he’s willing to do the implementation work to adapt those applications not to use the filesystem anymore.