Denis Roy's blog

Long before the cloud era, the Eclipse Foundation quietly served as the backbone of open source stewardship. Its software, frameworks, processes and infrastructure helped define and standardise developer workflows that are now core to modern engineering practices. As early as 2005, the Eclipse IDE’s modular plugin architecture embodied what we...

A few years ago, I noticed that things were changing in the Eclipse Foundation's (EF) IT operations: we were adding servers, and lots of them. Trays of 3U mega-machines, packing 14 compute units each, with on-board switches, immense fans and drawing much electrical power, providing our community with CPU cycles...

In 2005, there weren't many hosted forge options for developers. At the time, the Eclipse Foundation used CVS, Bugzilla and a host of other glued-together options to make these tools integrate together. We migrated from CVS to Git a couple of years later, and today the Eclipse forge still looks...

The world is environmentally conscious like never before. The planet's resources are not endless, and the amount of waste that our environment can tolerate is limited. We understand the need to recycle, the need for public transit, the need to use green energy, such as wind power and electric cars...

build:~ # halt That's the last command anyone will ever type on the venerable "build.eclipse.org" server. Born in 2005, it was used as a general-purpose machine for running builds and jobs for our committers. Some folks ran ant from cron jobs, some ran Cruise Control, and in 2007, we installed...

The Eclipse Foundation jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon a few years ago, for the same reasons as everyone else. Our need at the time was for a scalable/fault tolerant solution for our Jenkins-based CI system. We started small by repurposing older hardware, and with early successes, the cluster grew out...

We're seeing a trend of free (as in beer) resources being discontinued, or altered, with very little time provided to allow projects to react. This causes pain for OSS projects that use and depend on these services. The trend is certainly not new, and although there's certainly a case for...

On Friday, February 7 2020, Eclipse.org suffered a severe service disruption to many of its web properties when our primary authentication server and file server suffered a hardware failure. For 90 minutes, our main website, www.eclipse.org, was mostly available, as was our Bugzilla bug tracking tool, but logging in was...

Last Friday, Feb 7 at around 12:30pm (Ottawa time), I received a notification from Fred Gurr (part of our release engineering team) that something was going on with the infra. The multitude of colours on the Eclipse Service Status page confirmed it -- many of our services and tools were...

At EclipseCon Europe 2019 I attended a very interesting talk entitled " CI systems need care, too! Here's how we improved ours over the years". It was an eye opener! Here's what I gathered. New developer comes to a Company Company sells a software product built by a CI system...