MediaWiki on Kubernetes

We will provide a MediaWiki platform with the following characteristics:

• self-healing infrastructure
• auto-scaling
• high-availability with multi-server failover
• flexible storage backends
• multi-cloud compatibility

To do so, we'll need to implement Kubernetes.

We will almost certainly leverage Ansible as an orchestration tool. In a recent blog post on ansible.com, Jeff Geerling (@geerlingguy) answers the question: "How Useful is Ansible in a Cloud-native Kubernetes Environment? The short answer is that Ansible can be used for:

1. Container Build (Ansible-bender)
2. Cluster Management (Kubespray)
3. Application Lifecycle (Use Ansible to build Operators with the Operator SDK to handle deployment, upgrades, backups, etc.)

Here's more information about Ansible with Kubernetes

High-level outline

1. Build image. The WMF official images at Docker Hub do not even include a true database; never mind the extensions we need.
   1. With ansible-bender we can use ansible-playbook + buildah to create our image.
2. Publish images to Docker Hub
   1. Create organization account at Docker Hub; add freephile
   2. Create service account at GitHub - to prevent access to private repos through Docker Hub
   3. Add automated builds and automated testing
3. Create operator for MediaWiki. Note the blog article is from 2016. There are now many operators
4. Add metrics with the helm chart prometheus-operator

Docker (default in kublet ) is just one of many container runtimes that can be used with Kubernetes. The others include containerd and CRI-O.