Admin and Infrastructure

Manage servers, software and online (saas) services in support of the Plone community.

Purpose

The AI-team does the Administration of Infrastructure for the Plone Foundation to support the  Plone Community. We manage access and uptime of services like the different websites, DNS registration, e-mail services, uptime monitoring, GitHub account/group management, the CI-CD Jenkins setup, the Community Discuss website.

We also manage/configure external services like CloudFlare and the provisioning of our virtual servers at different cloud hosting provider and respond to security alerts/announcements when they concern any of the (non Plone) software the Plone Foundation uses on its servers. 

We use tools like configuration management (Ansible) and centralised password management.  Most of the Team members have a background or affinity with system administration and/of devops.

Active Team Members

Emeritus Members

These are recent former members of the AI-team that are no longer active and are recognised for their services and support. They can still do (occassional) work for the community in this or other teams, but shouldn't be contacted if you have any issues with Plone online resources that are AI-team related.

  • Fulvio Casali - fulv
  • Sven Strack - svx

Contact

Open issues at AI Team repository on Github

Email admins

Activities

The ai-team tries to have montly to quarterly meetings where we discuss new projects, but most of our activities are 'incident' or request driven when the servers and services operate smoothly.

When there are bigger issues/projects that need more planning, like a new service or a mahor upgrade/migration of a service, the AI-team can ask other experienced members in the Plone community and start a public discussion to community and rally community members to help.

Activities are coordinated through meetings, e-mail and tickets submitted GitHub issue tracker with a mention of @plone/ai-team.

How to Join / Team Membership process

If you meet the requirements below, please send an email to admins <at> plone.org and tell us a bit more about yourself, what your experience is and why you'd like to join the AI-team.

Profile of an AI-team member:

  • Demonstrates commitment to the Plone project
  • Demonstrates ability to handle the complex systems that comprise the Plone websites/services and development environment like GitHub en other SAAS services.
  • Has an affinity with system administration.
  • Communicative skills to handle with internal (community) and external (service provider) requests.
  • Completed and signed the core contributor agreement. This gives access to push to the Plone repository and provides protection against intellectual property ownership issues.
  • Should have approx. 1-4 hours a week available to look after our infrastructure/software, depending on your knowledge, skills and available time.

When you recognise yourself the above profile, have sent an application to us and the current members estimate you not unqualified, we'll schedule a chat and/or ask you to join a montly meeting. What then follows is a 6-12 month 'junior' membership. During this time you function as a team member, attend meetings/discussions and help with part of the systems/services the team manages.

If you like to continue the membership after this period and there are no issues/objections from other full team members, you will become a full member with access to all the systems/accounts.

We're happy with every help we can get, but please note it's not a strict requirement to be a member of the AI-team to contribute in general to the Plone Community infrastructure. For for example our CI/CD Setup, or the current new.plone.org upgrade project. For many of these community projects and services the AI-team takes care of required access/permisions and is the 'backup' for account management, incidents, security issues, initial setup of servers, and config, roles/permissions etc.

There's not an official member limit on the AI-team that needs to be strictly enforced. We need enough people 'on watch' so that at least someone has time to respond and look into issues/incident/security issues that come in, depending on the severity.