2022-01-26 Meeting notes

Zak Burke  followed by Jeremy Huff 

Action items reviewed

Jakub Skoczen to follow up with Devops and POs wrt scratch envs and hosted reference envs.  How do we determine if an environment isn't being used?  May required discussions with PO/Dev teams, and/or looking at usage metrics.

• EPAM KitFox devops team is responsible for rancher envs; is working on cleanup. Jakub Skoczen spoke with their scrum master; investigating possible shutdown during "off hours" but no conclusion yet. (Philip Robinson : is there really "off hours" in a global project? Jakub Skoczen this may be team-dependent, i.e. could be OK for co-lo'ed teams)
• Passed ball to devops WRT whether ref envs can be scaled down. 
• No convo yet WRT whether some ref envs (-testing, -load) can be shut down altogether.

All

Jeremy Huff 

Zak Burke 

The state of TCR-9 and TCR-12?

Jeremy Huff TCR-10 & TCR-11 update

Zak Burke TCR-7 update

• TCR-9: ui-translation Zak Burke is spearheading effort to organize this discussion
• TCR-12: ui-marc-authorities Zak Burke to contact Khalilah Gambrell for a status update as some details are missing
• TCR-11: plan a vote for next week
  • developing team originally determined no karate tests were necessary, but Peter Murray has engaged team to add some
  • Craig McNally what are voting on, exactly? Wasn't the determination that if the requirements were met, we are done? Jeremy Huff : does the TC just want to accept my determination here, or does the TC want to vote, i.e. vote is "Does the TC accept the review?"
  • there were some UI concerns originally; some addressed and some rebutted. Generally, rebuttals made sense. Sorting based on column-headers is still not implemented; whether it's required is debatable. There are legit arguments on both sides. 
• TCR-7: ui-bulk-edit: Zak Burke eval is just beginning; nothing to report at this time.

All

Chulin Meng

Zak Burke

Mike Gorrell 

Steffen Köhler 

• Application Technical Evaluation Subgroup
  • Craig McNally archived original group (which established existing module eval criteria); recruiting additional members and planning a meeting soon.
  • e.g. topics: clarify karate testing expectations
• Technical Evaluation Process Subgroup (Chulin Meng ) : reviewing existing documents; recruiting members from TC, will reach out to POs and Team Leads to figure out how to make this process less burdensome to both teams and councils. Will focus on submission step and communication processes. Perhaps Jeremy Huff and Zak Burke can assist here, and others. Anticipate finish during 2022-Q1.  Philip Robinson volunteers. 
• Translations Subgroup (Zak Burke ): nothing to report at this time; just getting started. 
• (Aside: Jeremy Huff notes we can populate these with SMEs from outside the TC, but it's unclear if we have a good way to solicit such membership. Is there a good way to publish a call for participation?)
• LTS / Versioning Subgroup (Mike Gorrell / Steffen Köhler ): Mike Gorrell met earlier this week (notes) and will present/discuss with PC tomorrow. Synopsis: too early to declare an LTS. Current conversation revolves around how/how long to backport fixes until we have a formally-designated LTS release.

Jakub Skoczen 

Jakub Skoczen Update up on Devops and POs comments.

From last week:

The CC has asked us to take stock of the hosted AWS environments and make recommendations for any changes (adding/removing/modifying). The context here is that the CC is:

The Community Council is about to undertake a membership drive and in prep for that we discussed what costs we need to cover, and AWS is a large part of that. We have seen AWS costs rise over the last year (potentially scary), and also see Open Sources-based credits applied from AWS (good news!). So we aren’t sure what things will look like going forward.

Essentially they're trying to make some AWS cost projections and want to know if there are any changes on the hosting side that might impact the AWS costs going forward.  

Ideally, we can elicit volunteers to look into the following and report back next week:

• Scratch/dev envs
  • Are any of these not being used? (e.g. because the team no longer exists, or for whatever reason the team doesn't use their scratch env, etc.).
  • Are there plans/need for additional scratch envs?
• Hosted reference envs
  • Can any of these be shut down?
  • How are they being used?
  • Are there plans/need for additionally hosted reference envs?

Craig McNally - this was posted earlier in TC's Slack channel; provided more details on the topic; make sense to handle this as much as possible offline

It's unclear with dev envs who and how is being used them; the general concern is the cost projections

Jakub Skoczen - there might be a way to control this though no immediate answer. Action item for Jakub Skoczen to follow-up with Devops and POs

Steffen Köhler - can some envs be stopped/removed? and how to check if env is still active and required?

Raman Auramau - proposed to think about tagging of AWS resources

Jakub Skoczen - monitoring for stale resources; the similar issue is with GitHub repos

Mark Veksler - agreed that resources should be tagged; one other common practice is to shut down some envs in off-work hours; another thing is a test data set (based on University of Chicago); an approach with several data sets for different needs - this seems to be a different topic

***

2022-01-26 discussion

• Jeremy Huff open question is to whether this is really under TC's purview? TC Charter explicitly says "resourcing" is not our thing, so this feels like a bit of a gray area. Mike Gorrell but ... if not TC then who? By process of elimination, feels like TC is best suited to offer advice here. Jakub Skoczen we have also been asked to review requests for new envs. Feels like this could/should be handled by a dedicated group from devops/sysops. Maybe Peter Murray and OLF sysops group is in a place to offer good info here? Folks on TC don't look at the bills, so not the best-placed group to make decisions. Jeremy Huff we can describe usefulness of different envs, but leave decision to a group that actually deals with bills/funding. But we probably need a somewhat systematic way to keep these evals fresh so is not laborious every time we are asked for input. Tod Olson soliciting input from outside TC is likely crucial here. Jakub Skoczen to ask Peter Murray to help organize such a group.

Jeremy Huff 

Review: Quarterly Community Update (Q4 2021)

Jeremy Huff will take the lead on this update.

Goal: continue working through this...

Previous notes from 2021-12-22 Meeting notes:

• Ready for review, see TC comments on CC designation of the leading council for FOLIO Vision, Strategic Objectives and Initiatives for PC and TC usage
• Has everyone (anyone) had a chance to review this yet?
• Tod Olson summarized the comments/input from TC members to date. Some of the dates needed to be pushed ahead as "near-term", "long-term" etc. mean something different now than they meant when the document was drafted.
  • In some instances, the commenters felt that certain objectives were really under the control of the service providers rather than the TC (dependencies on hosting environments and such). In such cases, Mike Gorrell and Ian Walls believe we might want to remove those objectives.
  • Zak Burke proposed that the TC could structure some of the minimum performance requirements, while also ensuring that performance is a priority of the developers and tech architects (preventing things like memory leaks etc)
  • VBar asked whether the bullet in question (#6) was really a performance requirement.
  • Jakub Skoczen sees this as belonging to the realm of SLA terms. The TC should not have a defining role on point 6.
  • VBar indicated we should be able to provide performance metrics within the project.
  • Marc Johnson believes that the TC needs to clarify and agree on concepts like performance/stability requirements first before moving forward with this document. Also, for today, we're just trying to figure out which Council should own #6 and whether it should be the TC.
  • Ingolf Kuss offered to take this point to the SysOps SIG for discussion - to help define the requirements and report them back to the TC.
  • Craig McNally recommended that we first note the topics in the document that we agree on, then focus in later meetings on the topics in the document that need additional discussion. 
  • Tod Olson noted that the PC and TC would have input on FOLIO "roadmaps," just need to specify which roadmaps - a technical one vs a "shared roadmap"?
• Discussion around whether the goals and objectives are commitments for the TC and how should they be prioritized along with other tasks the TC participates in
• It's not clear if a commitment is needed
• Jakub Skoczen categorizing objectives into short/mid/long term indicates a certain level of commitment from the TC to complete them, it's not clear how would these items be aligned with other work the TC is involved in
• Craig McNally should the objectives from the document be distilled into priorities/work items for the TC to make them actionable?
• Craig McNally we can turn the goals/objectives into a prioritized list and work our way through them rather than commit to a specific timeline
• Tod Olson short/mid/long term categorization can be still useful to establish priorities

****

2022-01-26 discussion

• Jeremy Huff : lots of great insight in this document, but some open questions too. Where do we want this document to go? Tod Olson : 1. internally facing; this is our own strategizing/prioritizing. 2. externally facing, allows other councils to understand what we do so we can better-align our efforts.
  • Community council originally tasked us with responding to the draft they provided. Mike Gorrell : no implied responsibility of TC to "reply", but wanted PC to and larger community to have sense of the TC's own goals. Jeremy Huff : end game for this doc is, in fact, to respond in order to establish expectations TC has for itself (its goals, its role in the broad context of FOLIO). Tod Olson : strip it down to TC-only items, explain discrepancies. This will take some time; possibly deliverable by 2022-02-09.

• Another meeting rules thing: should we have a formal policy/discussion about attendance, discussion, and decision making when attendance is low/less than half?
  • Do we even have formal TC policies?!?
  • Zak Burke : don't make decisions, by vote or lazy consensus, with less than half the members present.
  • Charlotte Whitt is there a general FOLIO policy about decision making the TC can simply follow?
  • Owen Stephens : there is documentation about making decisions; we should dust it off and enshrine it and make it easily accessible to people. Jeremy Huff : capture this beyond just mentioning it in meeting notes.