TSC Digest (Dec 2021)

[hcgatewood]

TSC Digest (Dec 2021)

This is the fourth official communication from the TSC. Previous communications include

• TSC Digest (Nov 2021)
• TSC Digest (June 2021)
• TSC: Improving Community Experience (May 2021)

This digest focuses on the TSC's support of community alignment, developer experience, and technical direction.

Community alignment

One of the principal motivations behind the TSC is engaging with the community toward aligning on development and process best practices.

Fully specify TSC lifecycle

The lifecycle for the Magma TSC, and the TSC chair, is now more-thoroughly defined. This will help safeguard the TSC's value to the community as it evolves past its initial 5 members.

TSC positions are elected via majority vote from the codeowners. Last until earliest of: 1-year term, resignation, or TSC-majority vote to end term early

TSC chair is elected via majority vote from the TSC. Last until earliest of: 1-year term, resignation, or TSC-majority vote to end term early

Migrate MagmaCore Foundation home to Confluence

The new home-base for the Magma project is shifting to Confluence, on a trial basis. We will announce this as it materializes. The goal is to provide a single, coherent entry point to the project and all associated resources.

As far as documentation, we will have 3 homes

1. The existing docs.magmacore.org will remain the de facto home for Magma documentation
2. The "contributors guide" will be moved from docs.magmacore.org to a GitHub Wiki
3. The new MagmaCore Confluence will be the entry point to the community, and support process-oriented coordination for and between various committees

Better branch management practices

We've added a formalized set of branch management best practices, including restricting who can create arbitrary branches on the main repo.

Developer experience

The TSC also focuses heavily on improving developer experience -- expecially for new and community contributors.

Make c-cpp-unit-tests a required CI check

As part of the AGW build system refactor to Bazel, this check now runs the majority of gateway service tests as merge-blocking CI check.

The check covers any new test targets added under lte/gateway/c/ and orc8r/gateway/c/. So we will not need to add any new CI checks for every new service that we add under these directories.

Make markdown-lint a required CI check

As part of the push for Magma documentation improvements, we went through and manually cleaned 500+ Markdown lints in our docs, simplified the docs precommit process, and added the Markdown linter as a merge-blocking CI check.

The win here is automatically enforcing a minimal set of Markdown standards. Only catches actual issues, rather than enforcing arbitrary style requirements.

Technical direction

Finally, the TSC serves as serialization point for making cross-component design decisions.

Toward Magma distributed tracing

Meta outlined the architecture and implementation path to outfit Magma with proper distributed tracing.

Distributed tracing unlocks developers with enhanced debugging tools and empowers operators with radically improved visibility into their deployments. Imagine real-time, dev-or-prod, passively-generated request tracing — across Orc8r and gateways.

Enodebd enhancements for cell PnP support

FreedomFi detailed a plan to provide plug-and-play radio onboarding.

Plug-n-play onboarding enables auto-discovery and configuration of a new radio connected to a Magma network. This will enable less sophisticated users to add radios to a Magma managed network, as well making it quicker and easier for private cellular deployment users to setup and/or scale their networks.

Inject component-specific Prometheus labels

Canonical described a plan to inject component-specific Prometheus labels, supporting e.g. metric origin-tracing.

In the Prometheus ecosystem, "static" labels (i.e., labels that apply to all metrics retrieved from one endpoint) are best configured at target level in the scraper (e.g., the Prometheus server). This is how, for example, one easily labels all metrics coming from one exporter as environment=prod.

AGW LTE C++ migration

Eurecom/OAI laid out a plan for migrating the AGW C code to modern C++.

Initially and historically, the development of MME magma was done only in C.

Many third party libraries and features that were integrated and or developed around the MME core are written in C++. The integration of third party C++ libraries necessary to support the evolution of the MME is each time not straightforward due to the significant remaining C code.