2024-02-26 Community Council Meeting Notes

FOLIO System Administration and DevOps

Mike Gorrell  

Per previous discussions (12-Feb-2024, 27-Nov-2023) Index Data will be moving away from some of the DevOps support that they’ve handled forever. We discussed how to deal with the DevOps work in the community in two areas: General System Administration and CI/CD work. ID had estimated 8-12 hours per week for the System Administration work. Because of skill-sets Index Data approached EBSCO about taking on the CI/CD work that has not gotten the needed attention. EBSCO is not able to take those on with current resources.

Last meeting Christopher Spalding suggested that EBSCO could hire a DevOps engineer from EPAM for approximately $85,000, which could be paid by the community (EBSCO would keep it’s donation to FOLIO at $139k).

In prep for today’s meeting Index Data summarized the CI/CD work:

The CI/CD work involves maintaining the various pipelines associated with every module located at https://github.com/folio-org   (there are currently 294 repositories - 185 Backend and 109 Frontend). The backend modules are set up to use Jenkins, the tool that was used when FOLIO began. There is a Shared Library for FOLIO Jenkins Pipeline that each module can rely on for CI/CD actions. Over the last few years the DevOps team has been moving these to GitHub Actions - all of the frontend modules have been migrated. Staff have not had time to migrate the backend to Github Actions, so as a result the team must try to maintain two different sets of tools, adding to the maintenance burden. These pipelines need to be updated, for example, to deal with new versions of software (packages/libraries/etc.) that the build process relies on. These also have to be created when a new module is introduced. It is easy to imagine this work consuming a full FTE - at least until Jenkins workflows have been moved to Github actions. The current state is that only emergency maintenance is done.

Today we’ll vote on funding the DevOps EPAM -

Treasurer’s update

Paula Sullenger

As approved at the last meeting, $90,000 was transferred from checking to the reserve account. Reserve now is fully funded at $180,000.

YTD income and expenses are updated as of Jan 31. FY24

FY25 invoices should be sent out May/June. Recommend we follow last year’s practice and send out reminders to key contacts early May.

Backlog of topics to discuss

FOLIO Developer Advocate

Mike Gorrell

First two candidates were rejected. Third candidate applied last week - will be scheduling an interview.

Action items to follow up with

Community survey

Tom Cramer 

Survey closed Friday Sep 29, 2023. Tom shared a first draft / summary of grouped items in 2023-11-27 Community Council Meeting notes .

Community communication norms

Tom Cramer Ian Ibbotson (Use this one) Christopher Spalding 

From 2023-08-25 Meeting notes

• idea about changing the ask on SIG's!  Information and discussion in the SIGs and a transport of summaries to upper levels

• asking how communication flows across the project, new people don't know, need some guidance for the project

• no update

Application and Platform Formalization WG

Ian Ibbotson (Use this one) (liaison to CC)

Notes folder: Application and Platform Formalization Proposals WG

Outreach and Marketing WG

Boaz Nadav Manes 

WG charge from 2023: WG charge from 2023: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZTOUOhwUtWaEjywKkS0cA41t1h0Wzhv_F9FR5Cyhqzk/edit