Case Study: Wikimedia Foundation simplifies wiki tools infrastructure with Kubernetes

Using Kubernetes to Build Tools to Improve the World's Wikis

Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia and other major collaborative reference projects, needed a better way to manage Wikimedia Tool Labs, a long-running and increasingly complex hosting environment for community-developed bots and tools. The existing infrastructure had become difficult to maintain, fragile, and full of custom Perl and Bash “duct tape,” while still needing to support developers using their existing workflows. Kubernetes was chosen to help simplify this complex environment without forcing contributors to change how they build tools.

Wikimedia Foundation migrated parts of its infrastructure to Kubernetes, using the platform to reduce custom code, improve maintainability, and provide more stable execution for user tools. With Kubernetes, Wikimedia has already moved 20 percent of its web tools that account for more than 40 percent of web traffic onto the platform, while running a 25-node cluster that stays current with Kubernetes releases. The project has also eliminated thousands of lines of old code, and more tools and bots continue to migrate to Kubernetes.

Wikimedia Foundation

Yuvi Panda

Operations Engineer