547908 - Setup a releng staging environment for non-releng use

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Release Engineering :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

(This was suggested today by mfinkle, but it has been raised before by others.)

The mobile team expressed an interest today in contributing patches to the releng team. To do so, they would need an environment in which to test those patches. 

The current releng staging environment is behind the build VPN and already experiences high demand from the releng team. Rather than open up this environment, I'm advocating setting up a new staging environment for use by the mobile team (or other interested parties) to hack on releng code.

We'd need to be pretty militant WRT imaging and being able to roll things back. Aside from that, as long as the machines are properly sandboxed, I think they could be pretty hands-off maintenance-wise.

We have a whole bunch of minis becoming available soon as we retire the rev2 talos machines. Perhaps we could set some aside for this application?

Some other options:
* improve documentation to allow developers to setup their own master/slave in the same config as releng
* create a script that does the above setup for them
* publish a VM image that has a master/slave already setup

Comment 1

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

Our master setup scripts are *much* better today that they were a year ago. A dev could easily setup their own local dev_master with minimal interaction with releng, and submit patches that we could sanity check in pre-production.