SUSE BuildOPS Team
The SUSE BuildOPS Team is a dedicated team of DevOPS employees who provide OBS as a service to the community and assist with daily operations.
This includes not only administration of the hardware and veritable zoo of services necessary to provide OBS, but also reviewing of packages for the openSUSE distribution, any targeted expansion on the OBS backend side (e.g., to provide Docker or Podman support), importing of new distributions, or creation of new top-level projects.
The Team consists of:
Frank is a Free Software enthusiast since the late 90s. Initially a system administrator he started to develop web-based software in Perl in 2002. He is currently focussing on kanku and some parts of the backend software like the OBS registry.
Besides standing around one of his kettle grills and celebrating BBQ’s, he’s an expert in prototyping rc-cars based open-source computer hardware like the raspPi or arduino.
You might know Lars from his former work in the openSUSE-Heroes or openSUSE-Education teams.
Responsibilities
The Team helps out with tasks during the complete OBS life cycle. From planning out features, over software development, to deployments, operating services and tracking the health and performance.
In addition, the team also takes care of package reviews for the openSUSE (and SUSE) distribution and actively helps with the development of the next product generation.
In the meantime, the team has also taken over the main responsibility of the mirror infrastructure behind https://download.opensuse.org/ and has written its own (Open Source) software named MirrorCache for the administration. While the team itself runs ‘only’ 3 public mirror servers, the build results provided by OBS are distributed to over 180 servers worldwide provided by the openSUSE community (THANKS!). Mirrorcache not only ensures that the different servers receive the correct packages, but also redirects requests from clients (zypper) to the closest servers.
Here are some of the team’s responsibilities within SUSE:
Site Reliability Engineering
- Infrastructure management
- Incident management
- Providing an 24/7 on call for side wide system outages
- Integration of OBS with other software in the stack
- Continuous deployment of the build.opensuse.org servers
- Monitoring the health and performance of all systems
Product Management
- Help Product and Release Management with the planning and administration of new products, releasing new snapshots or adjusting OBS project setups
- The Team is one of the main contacts for PackageHub related requests and reviews
- We review submit requests for various projects inside OBS - like openSUSE:Factory as one major example
- Help the Maintenance Team by providing a reliable maintenance engine
Project/Community Management
- Document features, workflows and concepts around OBS, kanku, MirrorCache or PackageHub
- Market the products and the team to (open)SUSE, the community and industry
- Organizing/Presenting at/Participating in technology conferences all over the world
Software Development
- Implementing features/bug fixes for the OBS backend side and build scripts
- Review and evaluate code submissions from other developers
- The main developers of kanku and MirrorCache work here
- Provide packaging and general OBS trainings
Where can you meet the Team?
The BuildOPS Team hangs out on the IRC channel #opensuse-buildservice on the openSUSE chat network.
They sporadically read and write to the opensuse-buildservice@opensuse.org mailing list.
