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
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.