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Author: Antonio Retico(SA1)
First Published: 10-Jan-2010
Last Update: 2010-03-09 by Main.unknown
Last Content Review: 10-Jan-2010
Expiration: 30-Apr-2010 (after this date please contact the author(s))

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Support to middleware deployment: job description

The support to middleware deployment is an EGEE-SA1 global task consisting of two main activities, largely independent:

• Coordination and support of Pilot and Experimental Services
• Coordination and support of the staged roll-out of middleware updates

For the two of them this document provides a synthetic job description in terms of duties, responsibilities and interfaces. Links to further documentation, tools and a basic calendar are offered as well.

Coordination and support of Pilot and Experimental Services

Process Overview

The process to manage pilot and experimental services is described in its general lines in the document PilotServicesOverview

A pilot service represents a burst of very focused activity carried on by different groups at different levels. Therefore to managing a pilot service may be a very demanding tasks. Sometimes different pilots turn out to have very different issues and dynamics, to which the coordinator has to adapt.

In order to make the distribution of the workloads easier we distinguish between the work of the task coordinator (who is responsible for the "service of providing pilot services") and the pilot coordinator who actually manages pilot service "project"

Duties and responsibility of the task coordinator(s)

• Maintain tools and procedures (see list in 'Resources')
• Maintain documentation and web pages
• Upon request for a new pilot or experimental service analyse its feasibility/opportunity and support the Operations coordination in the decision to instantiate the service or not.
• Take care of the initiation phase of the pilot service project (e.g. set-up initial contact list, communication channels, scout for interested sites, user communities etc.)
• Appoint the "pilot service coordinator"

Duties and responsibility of the pilot service coordinator(s)

• Manage the various stages of the development and operations of a pilot service
  • consolidate use cases and scenarios
    • use cases
    • involved users
    • measurable objectives and success metrics
    • involved sites
  • run kick-off meeting
  • follow-up the execution phase
    • manage work packages
    • develop ad-hoc procedures if needed
    • facilitate communication and ease controversies
    • continuously monitor and evaluate the work being done by check-points
  • close the service
    • Wrap-up and communication of results
    • Release of the resources * Report to SA1 management or to other bodies (e.g. GDB) when requested

Interfaces

The task coordinator

• reports and escalates to the SA1 management ( occ-grid-support@cern.h )
• interacts with the many subjects or bodies that can request a pilot service (e.g EGI.org, users (SSC), NGIs, MCB and even UMD developers
• Members of the gLite Release team ( gd-release-team@cern.ch ) are preferably involved in the pilots in order to whatch on the consistency of the middleware version used in the pilot with the vesions on the standard testing path.
• issues direct work orders to the Early Adopter sites (staged roll-out tasks)
• publish vacancies and receive commitments through the ROC Managers list ( project-egee-roc-managers )
• Contributes to the weekly EGEE Operations Meeting (bulletin with status of the active pilots, vacancy notices)

The pilot coordinator

• reports and escalates to the task coordinator
• interacts with all parties concerned in the operations of a pilot service, typically site managers, users, developers, testers

Resources

Unless differently indicated, all the resources below are owned and maintained by the task coordinator

• Entry-point web page with links to relevant tools and documentation: http://www.cern.ch/pps/index.php?dir=./MPS/ . [[][technical info]]
  • in particular most of the documents are kept in the service home page on twiki
• Savannah group "Sa1 Deployment" https://savannah.cern.ch/projects/sa1dep/ to manage squads and tasks
• Tables of estimated effort for the different operation al tasks from the PPS Service description (to be re-organised)
• Activity Management tools: http://www.cern.ch/pps/index.php?dir=./ActivityManagement/
  • Task Monitor
  • SA1 Deployment Task Tracking [[][technical info]]

Calendar

• Monday:
  • 14.30 CE(S)T : EMT Meeting (http://indico.cern.ch/categoryDisplay.py?categId=1146 )
• Wednesday:

Coordination and support of the staged roll-out of middleware updates

Process Overview

The process to roll-out middleware updates to the production service in a controlled way is described in its general lines in the document StagedRolloutOverview

Duties and responsibility of the task coordinator(s)

• Participate to the gLite release procedure playing the role of OU
• Take action in the process of managing incident in production due to broken releases
• Monitor software problem reports in the 'Production', 'Preproduction' and 'Beta Service' areas
• Participate to the EMT meetings
• Produce weekly bulletins to present at the EGEE Operations meeting and WLCG Operations meeting
• Maintain the lists of committed Early Adopter sites (to be simplified)
• Maintain 'wish lists' of services to be covered by Early Adopters and publish the vacancies on behalf of the SA1 management
• Maintain tools and procedures (see list in 'Resources')
• Maintain documentation and web pages
• Report to SA1 Management when requested

Interfaces

The task coordinator

• reports and escalates to the SA1 management ( occ-grid-support@cern.h )
• contributes to the EMT (list: project-eu-egee-middleware-emt@cern.ch )raising priorities possibly coming from the production service
• interacts with the gLite Release team ( gd-release-team@cern.ch ) in the framework of the release process and generally contributing to the short-term planning of the middleware updates. The short-term planning technically falls in the scope of the EMT, but as far as the release composition is concerned it is actually performed by direct interaction with the release team, as the EMT is currently much more focused on the prioritisation of the developers' work
• publish vacancies and receive commitments through the ROC Managers list ( project-egee-roc-managers )
• Contributes to the weekly EGEE Operations Meeting (bulletin with status of the release, vacancy notices)
• On weekly basis contributes to the weekly WLCG Operations Meeting (bulletin with status of the release)
• issues direct work orders to the Early Adopter sites (staged roll-out tasks)

Resources

Unless differently indicated, all the resources below are owned and maintained by the task coordinator

• Entry-point web page with links to relevant tools and documentation: http://www.cern.ch/pps/index.php?dir=./rollout/ . technical info
  • in particular most of the documents are kept in the service home page on twiki
• Activity management registry used to maintain list of commitments, function to be partially replaced by GOCDB: http://www.cern.ch/pps/index.php?dir=./ActivityManagement/Registry/ [[[][technical info]]
• Savannah group "Sa1 Deployment" https://savannah.cern.ch/projects/sa1dep/
• Activity Management tools: http://www.cern.ch/pps/index.php?dir=./ActivityManagement/
  • Task Monitor
  • SA1 Deployment Task Tracking [[][technical info]]
  • Activity Management Registry [[][technical info]]
  • ASTAS (Automatic Savannah TAsk Submission ) + templates
• Several cronjobs to synchronise the tools [[][technical info]]

Calendar

• Monday:
  • 14.30 CE(S)T : EMT Meeting (http://indico.cern.ch/categoryDisplay.py?categId=1146 )
  • 16.00 CE(S)T : EGEE Operations meeting (http://indico.cern.ch/categoryDisplay.py?categId=258)
• Wednesday:
  • 15.00 CE(S)T: WLCG Operation meeting (WLCGOperationsMeetings)
  • 16.30 CE(S)T: EMT Meeting (http://indico.cern.ch/categoryDisplay.py?categId=1146 )
• Every second Thursday:
  • 15.30 CE(S)T: Tier1 Service Coordination Meeting (http://indico.cern.ch/categoryDisplay.py?categId=2726)