[Announcement] Athens Preview Deployment

[arschles]

This issue is an announcement that came after the maintainers discussed. I hope you like what you read!

What's Going On?

We’re gonna deploy the proxy to the public internet for the Go community to use! 🎉 😄

Background

Athens is about 6 months old (here’s our first commit!) and I think we're more rad then ever. Since day one, the community has grown a ton, the project has matured, people are using this thing for real, and most importantly to me, our philosophy is still going strong (most importantly, we’re all still positive and nice to each other).

Now we're going to take a next (big) step in the project 😄

A Preview Public Deployment

Note: the public preview deployment is no longer available.

Some peeps might already know that we’ve already been experimenting with a public Athens already. If you didn’t, it’s at https://microsoftgoproxy.azurewebsites.net/.

That thing is experimental and we mean it - there’s no testing, it doesn’t have any CI/CD, and the last time I think it was touched was before GopherCon. Also, I don't think any maintainer on the project including me has credentials to deploy to it or do any other kind of maintenance.

The goal of a preview is to give people some more promises so that they can realistically try a public Athens out in their projects.

So, we’re gonna deploy the Athens proxy publicly, in preview. We want “preview” to mean this:

- The domain name won't change as long as it’s in preview. It might change when the preview’s over, though
- The proxy won't have any SLA, but we’ll still make every realistic effort to keep it running and available
- We’ll always publish what version of the proxy is running
- The deployment will run exactly the same code that’s in the repo. I hope that goes w/o saying but just making sure :)

It's Done Already, Right?

There are still 2 issues open that we want or need to fix (probably need) before we deploy a thing and call it "preview."

• De-duplicating backend VCS fetches: Implement Distributed Deduplication Mechanisms #760
• Critical sections for our CDN storage drivers: Mutual exclusion for the /list and other shared endpoints for CDN/object storage drivers #761

They both came up because we want to be able to deploy Athens across a fleet of nodes, and this looks like everything we need to do for that. Whenever we finish those issues, we'll deploy the preview and write some docs on how to use it.

All Are Welcome

As always with this project, absolutely anyone can contribute - regardless of experience, background, or anything else. That means you can do anything from ask questions to comment on issues (including this one if you have ideas!) to work on any issue including the ones above.

This whole preview thing isn't a special part of Athens or anything like that.

When's Stable?

We don't know yet, but we know what we need to do before we get there.

One big goal before a stable release is to make sure that long term, the proxy service won’t disappear or break. That means we'll need to have lots of people responsible for it. We'll also need to have a governance model to organize all of this stuff.

This work might be a place where maintainers will need to do things not 100% transparently. We haven't done much in this area yet.

When we do get started, we'll do everything we can to make sure the community is involved early.

Comments?

All of the maintainers believe that a preview proxy service is a great addition to what we're already doing, and it's the right thing to do. We also think that it has almost no impact on the direction of the project. For example, everything in our v0.1.0 milestone is still valid and anyone can pick up issues there.

All of that said, if you believe otherwise, please please please leave a comment in this issue!

We'll discuss this entire issue in the October 11 development meeting, and in future dev meetings if anyone wants/needs more time.

How Does This Affect v0.1.0?

This preview deployment shouldn't affect our v0.1.0 milestone. Everything we need to do for this is in the preview milestone. We'd like to keep the two milestones separate so that we can release the beta separately from this.

[arschles]

A few additional notes:

• We're talking about deploying a proxy but not a registry. That means the following big things, plus more small ones that I'll elide for brevity:
  • Users can't directly upload code to the thing. The "publish" process for a package is the same git push workflow
  • The thing won't have a UI where you can login, have a profile, or anything else like that (NPM, for example, has something like this)
    • It might eventually have a UI to serve docs and so on, though
• We're not going to try and build a registry at all for the time being. I've gone and closed/amended a lot of issues accordingly. You can see a big list of them above

[michalpristas]

can we remove db diff code?

[arschles]

@michalpristas yes absolutely - looks like you already found #777 😄

[arschles]

I will take this issue btw 😄

[arschles]

Closing this because we have had athens.azurefd.net up for a while. Also see https://arschles.com/blog/athens-on-azure-kubernetes-service/ for related work