The Infrastructure team is a small group of volunteers, who manage Drupal.org servers and keep our website online. The amount of work is growing and the team is very small. With the current amount of people it is really hard to manage the Drupal.org infrastructure efficiently, and that is why growing the team is a top priority this year for the Drupal.org Infrastructure Working Group.

What exactly do we need help with?

We are looking for people who are able to help us with the following:

• Read config files, document what is there and ask “why?” questions in case they see something unusual.
• Maintain infrastructure Issue queue, including packaging troubleshooting and support.
• IRC management - handle IRC channel ownership requests, provide support for community regarding their IRC channels, ‘ops’ lists, channel registration, etc.
• Manage configuration management for infrastructure with Puppet, PuppetDB and custom Puppet modules. Provide PuppetDB / Facter integration with a custom Drupal module to display an inventory of running services, package versions, and other details.
• Create custom Nagios checks, graph service status and performance with Cacti or Munin, and provide additional monitoring solutions that we haven’t thought of yet.
• Provide development and staging clusters for use by developers working on Drupal.org and sub-sites. Add Vagrant integration for automating deployment of sanitized development VMs for testing changes.
• Creating sanitized development databases. Reducing the size of the Drupal.org development data set.
• Document current infrastructure setup and maintain this documentation, ensure it’s up to date.
• Migration of the Git server and drupalcode.org to a cluster of servers using Varnish, Twisted Git daemon, Supervisord, Beanstalkd, cgit and DRBD.
• Loghost setup - get it to log all the data that is accumulated on our infrastructure, process it into graphs to make finding and resolving issues easier.
• Security monitoring - evaluate potential security threats on an ongoing basis and work with subsite maintainers to ensure updates are regularly applied to all Drupal sites.
• Extend existing Drupal, mod_security and PHP Suhosin security rule sets.

As you can see, there are a lot of different tasks. Some require specific knowledge and some are quite simple. If you are interested to find out more, you’ve got a unique opportunity this week! On Thursday, September 26th at 1pm the Drupal.org Infrastructure Working Group will hold a community conversation. Come meet the team and find out how you can help!