meta/2024-01-mvp-demo-roadmap.md

Target: Demo at Fediforum online conference 2025-04-01

Goal: Demo Fediversity and make this demo available for download for others to use. Focus on 1 or 2 Fediverse applications that can be 'automagically' installed aka a minimal viable product.

To determine:

• What are the minimal requirements to make this happen?
• What components are needed?
• Which Fediverse services are we going to offer?
• There are ~47 (~9weeks) workdays between 27-01-2025 and 01-04-2025. How will we divide the work among the team?

Roadmap

• As a first measure, set up a new site with a simple email form: "set up your Fediverse services"
• Initial form fields:
• text field: subdomain to use under e.g. demo.fediversity.eu
• multi-select: services to deploy (start with one or two)
• text fields: ssh public keys
• freeform: additional requests
• Simply send an email to the project team for manual processing
• Figure out the rest as we go, automate time-consuming repetitive tasks incrementally
• Systematically keep procedural notes from which we can later derive code
• Split test environment into staging and production deployment
• Start preparing a Django service (as discussed 2024-11-06) that will eventually replace the manually processed form
• It will take about a work week to make the development cycle smooth (maybe 2 weeks on the wall clock), enough to refine the initial data model
• It could trigger NixOps4 asynchronously on form submission
• Requires figuring out the exact interaction model on the backend. Especially how deployment state gets stored, retrieved, and updated
• Requires a Passbolt provider for dynamic secrets (as discussed regarding secrets handling 2024-12-10)
• We probably don't want to mess with Git-backed storage there
• Requires a proper deployment provider
• Terraform is currently planned
• For single NixOS machines something more robust than a shellscript would already be nice, but that would require talking to Proxmox via API anyway
• Rebrand MyProtagio to Fediversity
  • It currently interfaces with an intermediate registrar, need to remove that
  • Demo users could register an actual domain using a voucher token
• Interfacing with MyProtagio for leveraging its DNS setup capabilities may need more time to study the code
  • We’d ideally co-deploy an instance with the other front-end to enable smooth CI/CD; though that’s more up-front work
  • MyProtagio doesn't have metering or billing yet
    • If we hand out exactly one credit, it would include one domain name and some bulk service package for some period of time

TODO

• Division of labor
  • Tweag can do the domain-specific data types and transformations, as well as the the backend wiring
    • Ronny asked to get involved in the domain modeling
  • Waiting for Koen to contact their UI expert
  • Robert needed for NixOps4 providers
• Selection of initial services
  • Also have to resolve friction around versions being up to date in Nixpkgs

Next steps

• Define detailed scope, integration points, schedule