This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:WMCS WP:WMFCLOUD

Wikimedia Cloud Services

Wikimedia Cloud Services logo
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Wikimedia community
URL	wmcloud.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Required for developers only
Users	1,464+
Launched	June 3, 2011; 13 years ago (2011-06-03)
Content license	Free license

Wikimedia Cloud Services (WMCS) (formerly known as WMFLabs or Labs) is a flexible computing ecosystem built on OpenStack and Kubernetes. The project empowers technical contribution to the Wikimedia software world. The products and resources of the WMCS project are available for use by anyone connected with the Wikimedia movement. Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by a Wikimedia Foundation team and Wikimedia movement volunteers. More information about WMCS products and services can be found from the Wikitech wiki, which also hosts technical docs about the Foundation's main servers (aka the production environment).

Anybody is allowed to create a Wikimedia developer account which can be used to request access to Toolforge or Cloud VPS, but all software must be released under a free license per wikitech:Wikitech:Cloud Services Terms of use. Related help can be found at wikitech:Help:Cloud VPS and wikitech:Help:Toolforge, respectively.

Cloud VPS provides collaboratively-owned collections of virtual private servers where users develop and maintain software projects that help the Wikimedia movement.

Software tools, including scripts and bots related to maintaining WMF projects, can be hosted on the Wikimedia Toolforge servers. Additional help for developers may be found at wikitech:Help:Toolforge. A complete listing of tools can be found at Toolforge:admin/tools, and a more detailed list of some of them at toolforge:hay/directory.

Data Services is a collection of products, including private-information-redacted copies of Wikimedia's production wiki databases, and access to Wikimedia Dumps.

The list of team members that run Wikimedia Cloud Services can be found at mw:Wikimedia Cloud Services team. A list of sysadmins for Toolforge is available at toolforge:openstack-browser/project/tools. Developers may get additional help at:

• #wikimedia-cloud ^connect - IRC channel on Libera Chat
• cloud@lists.wikimedia.org - Wikimedia Cloud Services mailing list archives

Wikimedia Cloud Services was designed to give volunteer software developers a place to write and test software for WMF operations, with the goal of increasing volunteers' ability to help maintain WMF's infrastructure. It was opened for beta testing to a limited number of users in October 2011. After several months of testing, the service was opened to the public in April 2012.

Wikimedia Cloud Services included two main branches, initially named Wikimedia Labs and Tool Labs. The latter was meant to provide a replacement for the Wikimedia Toolserver, which had been hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland.

In February 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation contracted Marc-André Pelletier to provide assistance to tool/bot authors in migrating their tools and bots to the Wikimedia Labs' servers. A help page for migrating has been set up at wikitech:User:Magnus Manske/Migrating from toolserver with helpful advice. General information may be found at mw:Wikimedia Labs/Tool Labs/Migration of Toolserver tools.

Some users tested the migration process by transferring their tools to WMF Labs early. The full-scale migration process began in June 2013, and was expected to be complete by December 2013. By June 2014, items on the Toolserver would be deleted. The final decommissioning of the Toolserver was on July 1, 2014.

In 2017, Wikimedia Labs was renamed to Wikimedia Cloud VPS, and Tool Labs was renamed to Toolforge. This was to remove the ambiguity, and to clarify their purposes.

See also

• WMFblog:2013/05/30/preparing-for-the-migration-from-the-wikimedia-toolserver-to-tool-labs
• October 2012 Signpost report
• April 2012 Signpost article on Wikimedia Labs
• WMFblog:2012/04/16/introduction-to-wikimedia-labs/

• Toolserver replacements, a table of replacements for popular English Wikipedia and Commons tools
• mw:Wikimedia Cloud Services team
• Userbox at {{User wikitech}}