COVID-19 contingency plans for infra and release engineering

[Ben Cotton]

Hi teams,

As many of you already know, Red Hat has asked all employees to work
from home. I know that many (most?) of you don't work from a Red Hat
office normally (particularly if you're not a Red Hat employee!), but
I want to check on the impact that an extended shutdown might have on
the infrastructure, particularly the release engineering activities as
we approach the Fedora 32 GA (currently scheduled for 21 April).

In addition, what are our personnel risks? For example, if Mohan gets
too sick to work, do we have enough shared knowledge and access to cut
a release?

Obviously, everyone is going to be impacted in some way, even if none
of us get sick. This is a stressful and uncertain time. I've made it
clear to Fedora and Red Hat leadership that we will continue with the
schedule, but that the priority is the health of our community
members. I don't want anyone working beyond what's reasonable for
their personal situation. I just need to understand the risks so we
can make plans to mitigate them or adjust the release schedule.


Thanks,
BC

-- 
Ben Cotton
He / Him / His
Senior Program Manager, Fedora & CentOS Stream
Red Hat
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis

[Mohan Boddu]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 10:51 AM Ben Cotton <bcotton(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  Hi teams,
>
>  As many of you already know, Red Hat has asked all employees to work
>  from home. I know that many (most?) of you don't work from a Red Hat
>  office normally (particularly if you're not a Red Hat employee!), but
>  I want to check on the impact that an extended shutdown might have on
>  the infrastructure, particularly the release engineering activities as
>  we approach the Fedora 32 GA (currently scheduled for 21 April). 
From RelEng side we are good, but there might be some issues with QA
as some tests are run manually on bare metal machines located at some
of our offices. People will not have access to these machines if the
offices are closed and maybe we have skip them for F32 GA.

>  In addition, what are our personnel risks? For example, if Mohan gets
>  too sick to work, do we have enough shared knowledge and access to cut
>  a release? 
Thanks Ben :)
But, I am working on updating the docs so that it will be easier for
either jednorozec or nirik to pick up the work.

>
> Obviously, everyone is going to be impacted in some way, even if none
> of us get sick. This is a stressful and uncertain time. I've made it
> clear to Fedora and Red Hat leadership that we will continue with the
> schedule, but that the priority is the health of our community
> members. I don't want anyone working beyond what's reasonable for
> their personal situation. I just need to understand the risks so we
> can make plans to mitigate them or adjust the release schedule.
>
>
> Thanks,
> BC
>
> --
> Ben Cotton
> He / Him / His
> Senior Program Manager, Fedora & CentOS Stream
> Red Hat
> TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis
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[Kevin Fenzi]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 10:49:41AM -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
>  Hi teams,
>  
>  As many of you already know, Red Hat has asked all employees to work
>  from home. I know that many (most?) of you don't work from a Red Hat
>  office normally (particularly if you're not a Red Hat employee!), but
>  I want to check on the impact that an extended shutdown might have on
>  the infrastructure, particularly the release engineering activities as
>  we approach the Fedora 32 GA (currently scheduled for 21 April). 
Yeah, all the infrastructure and releng folks are already remote. 

So, I don't think this will have too much impact. 
 
>  In addition, what are our personnel risks? For example, if Mohan
> gets
>  too sick to work, do we have enough shared knowledge and access to cut
>  a release? 
Yep. I think we do. I think we have at least 2 folks able to do any one
thing (of course it would be good to increase this number). 
>  
>  Obviously, everyone is going to be impacted in some way, even if none
>  of us get sick. This is a stressful and uncertain time. I've made it
>  clear to Fedora and Red Hat leadership that we will continue with the
>  schedule, but that the priority is the health of our community
>  members. I don't want anyone working beyond what's reasonable for
>  their personal situation. I just need to understand the risks so we
>  can make plans to mitigate them or adjust the release schedule. 
Yeah, it's really hard to predict. I hope after the next week or so we
will know more longer term impacts and settle into some kind of new 
'routine'.

kevin