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Showing content from https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Labs_labs_labs below:

Help:Labs labs labs - Wikitech

Prior to June 2017, there were several different Wikimedia technical projects with "Labs" in their name. Depending on the context, people may have been referring to one of these three (or others). To avoid further confusion, use their proper name. Not everyone remembers the labs, labs, labs lessons of the past so we also have new products to add to the disambiguation list presented here.

Nutshell

Wikimedia Cloud VPS (formerly Wikimedia Labs), a cloud computing infrastructure (maintained by Wikimedia Cloud Services).
Toolforge (formerly Tool Labs), a platform for web services and bots run by volunteers (maintained by Wikimedia Cloud Services).
Beta Cluster (was collegially called Beta Labs), a small MediaWiki farm hosted in Wikimedia Labs, running the latest master of MediaWiki.
Wikitech (this wiki) was formerly called "Labs console", because the OpenStack management software for Wikimedia Labs (now Wikimedia Cloud VPS) was installed and operated from a set of Special pages on the Wikitech wiki. The labsconsole: interwiki prefix is still supported today for compatibility of linking between pages. It has the same destination as the wikitech: interwiki prefix. The Wikitech wiki database is still internally named labswiki, because it's difficult to rename databases^[1], and thus "Labswiki" is sometimes used to refer to Wikitech wiki.
Experimentation Lab (sometimes xLab, formerly Metrics Platform) is a collection of systems for enabling collection of data on feature usage and analyzing that data.

Wikimedia Cloud VPS (formerly Wikimedia Labs or Labs) provides cloud computing infrastructure for people doing Wikimedia-related work. The virtual machines are powered by the OpenStack software, administered through Horizon (and historically through special pages on this wiki). The environment also provides auxiliary services, such as shared NFS storage, and access to live replica databases of Wikimedia Foundation wikis.

Toolforge and Beta Cluster are just two of many projects run on virtual machines hosted in Wikimedia Cloud VPS.

See this list of other projects, for other examples.

More information at Portal:Cloud VPS.

Toolforge (formerly Tool Labs) is a platform for volunteers to easily run web services, bots and other applications. Users deploy applications directly onto a shared Grid Engine, and use other shared services (such as Redis). Users have the comfort of not needing to become system administrators of any (virtual) servers or hardware, instead the platform is entirely provided by the Toolforge admin team.

All web applications are served through a subdomain of toolforge.org. Previously tools with web applications were served though https://tools.wmflabs.org. Toolforge supersedes the "Toolserver" previously run by Wikimedia Deutschland.

The Toolforge platform is powered by Wikimedia Cloud VPS, but this aspect is not relevant to its users.

More information at Help:Toolforge.

Beta Cluster

The Beta Cluster is a small wiki farm used to test code changes that affect Wikimedia wikis. It runs the latest alpha version of the MediaWiki software and closely matches the configuration of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.

The main portal is at beta.wmflabs.org, with a beta version of English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org.

It should also not be confused with the following.

Beta Features, a MediaWiki extension deployed both on live sites and the Beta Cluster for incubating new features.
Mobile Beta features

This is why one should avoid referring to Beta Cluster as merely "Beta".

The project housing the virtual machines of the Beta Cluster in Wikimedia Cloud VPS is named "deployment-prep". Unfortunately, renaming that project is not possible at the moment.

More information at Beta Cluster.

Experimentation Lab

A 2025 rebranding of the systems and services formerly known as Metrics Platform. You may also see this called xLab in various documentation and chats. You can use the Experimentation Lab to create instrumentation that captures click rates, conversion rates, and other metrics.

Other usage of the term lab

The database of the former Beta Cluster landing page (deployment.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org) was originally also named labswiki.^[2]
The Grafana installation for WMCS was historically hosted at https://grafana-labs.wikimedia.org/ (see grafana.wikimedia.org#Wikimedia Cloud Services).