The MergeTB mission is to provide a reliable, scalable and high-performance testbed platform for researchers and developers working in networked systems. Building distributed experiments and systems is a complex task that quickly becomes infeasible if the environment in which they are evaluated is untrustworthy, resists workflows that make experimentation effective or cannot keep up with the cadence of ingenuity driving the research.
The MergeTB mission extends beyond simply building a testbed technology base that’s reliable and fast at scale. The technology landscape is continuously evolving and our mission is a moving target. Our mission includes seeking out new experiments that test our claims of reliability, scalability and performance in new contexts – to move forward based on the experience of building solutions that work and meet the standards set by the capabilities that came before them.
Finally, inherent to our mission of reliability is stability. Stability in the face of change is forged form an unwavering process. For Merge this means a development process based on well established norms for community-based distributed development, defining a release up front as a complete slice of the entire Merge ecosystem in which all components are guaranteed to work well together, a release process that ensures quality control and gates releases on acceptance tests over timelines, a guarantee never to break compatibility within a major release, a robust model for release and upgrade publication and, an automated, reproducible and strongly versioned workflow that carries us from code to production.