Streamlined Management
Interview – Wikimedia's Jaime Crespo
Jaime Crespo, from the Wikimedia Foundation, discusses the challenges of managing one of the world's largest collaborative knowledge projects.
At Percona Live Europe 2019, I joked with Jaime Crespo, Senior Database Administrator (DBA) for the Wikimedia Foundation, that the Wikipedia project is essentially just one big database. You might expect that it takes hordes of DBAs to keep one of the world's largest knowledge pools constantly online, but you'd be wrong. Crespo shares the unique challenges Wikimedia faces in managing its servers.
Linux Magazine: Tell me about yourself and how you got started as a database administrator.
Jaime Crespo: My name is Jaime Crespo, and, by my name, it's easy to spot that I'm from Spain. I'm currently the Senior Database Administrator for the Wikimedia Foundation. A bit of follow up to that I have to do is that the Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that provides support, mostly technology, legal and management, to the Wikipedia project and to a lot of other open knowledge projects that we maintain. The actual work is done by everyone, that is, our volunteers. I'm part of the SRE team (Site Reliability Engineering) that helps maintain the servers, so that volunteers and contributors can edit.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
Danish Ministry of Digital Affairs Transitions to Linux
Another major organization has decided to kick Microsoft Windows and Office to the curb in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.