Add 2019-10-29 infra team meeting minutes

posts/inside-rust/2019-10-29-infra-team-meeting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "2019-10-29 Infrastructure Team Meeting"
+author: Pietro Albini
+team: the infrastructure team <https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/operations#infra>
+---
+
+Meeting run by Mark-Simulacrum. Minutes written by pietroalbini.  
+Attending: alexcrichton, kennytm, Mark-Simulacrum, pietroalbini, shepmaster  
+[Start of the conversation][discord]
+
+[discord]: https://discordapp.com/channels/442252698964721669/443148319431065610/638784152014946321
+
+## News from the team
+
+- A big PR moving most of the CI build environment preparation to standalone
+  scripts finally landed! This will allow multiple other CI improvements down
+  the line!
+
+- A crates.io staging environment behind CloudFront has been configured on
+  [staging.cratesio.com](https://staging.cratesio.com), testing the
+  configuration before deploying it on the main domain. Please note the staging
+  server is on a temporary domain and will be moved in the near future.
+
+## Rolling back the msys2 hack (P-high issue)
+
+Last week there was an issue in our CI caused by a broken `ca-certificates`
+msys2 package, that caused all the windows builders to fail. To patch the
+problem an older version of that package was vendored and CI was configured to
+download it instead of the broken one. Now that upstream fixed the issue,
+pietroalbini will prepare PRs targeting both master and beta rolling back the
+temporary patch.
+
+## What to do with mirroring msys2/mingw?
+
+The CI issue mentioned in the previous topic started thoughts about vendoring
+msys2 and MinGW as a whole, to prevent such issues from happening in the
+future. msys2 is a weird program to package as it’s more of a Linux-like
+distribution on Windows, with its own package manager based on tooling borrowed
+from Arch Linux.
+
+Creating the initial mirrors is not trivial but doable, but the concern is how
+to keep them updated, because for example an outdated OpenSSL is really bad.
+mati865 suggested that other projects often tar the whole msys2 installation
+directory and periodically update that, and we’ll explore that. More discussion
+on the approach will likely happen on the PR implementing the changes.
+
+## Restricted AWS access for docs.rs operators
+
+One of the issues exposed in the [docs.rs outage postmortem][outage] was that
+the people in the docs.rs on-call rotation did not have access to the AWS
+resources part of docs.rs. pietroalbini proposed to give them limited access,
+namely to stop/start the EC2 instance and to inspect/change the underlying S3
+storage bucket. Mark-Simulacrum thought the access was not needed in practice,
+and we agreed to revisit the topic if issues arise again.
+
+[outage]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2019/10/24/docsrs-outage-postmortem.html
+
+## New server for perf
+
+To ensure consistent results the collector for [perf.rust-lang.org] needs to be
+on bare metal hardware, and until now it was a server lying under
+alexcrichton’s desk. The server will have to be moved by December though, and
+alexcrichton asked the team on feedback on what to do. There was consensus that
+the best solution is to look for a rented bare metal server, and pietroalbini
+will do an initial investigation.
+
+[perf.rust-lang.org]: https://perf.rust-lang.org