2014 USENIX Release Engineering Summit CFP now open

The CFP for the 2014 Release Engineering summit (Western edition) is now open.  The deadline for submissions is September 5, 2014 and speakers will be notified by September 19, 2014.  The program will be announced in late September.  This one day summit on all things release engineering will be held in concert with LISA, in Seattle on November 10, 2014. 

Seattle skyline © Howard Ignatius, https://flic.kr/p/6tQ3H Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

From the CFP

"Suggestions for topics include (but are not limited to):

• Best practices for release engineering
• Practical information on specific aspects of release engineering (e.g., source code management, dependency management, packaging, unit tests, deployment)
• Future challenges and opportunities in release engineering
• Solutions for scalable end-to-end release processes
• Scaling infrastructure and tools for high-volume continuous integration farms
• War and horror stories
• Metrics
• Specific problems and solutions for specific markets (mobile, financial, cloud)

URES '14 West is looking for relevant and engaging speakers and workshop facilitators for our event on November 10, 2014, in Seattle, WA. URES brings together people from all areas of release engineering—release engineers, developers, managers, site reliability engineers, and others—to identify and help propose solutions for the most difficult problems in release engineering today."

War and horror stories. I like to see that in a CFP.  Describing how you overcame problems with  infrastructure and tooling to ship software are the best kinds of stories.  They make people laugh. Maybe cry as they realize they are currently living in that situation.  Good times.  Also, I think talks around scaling high volume continuous integration farms will be interesting.  Scaling issues are a lot of fun and expose many issues you don't see when you're only running a few builds a day. 

If you have any questions surrounding the CFP, I'm happy to help as I'm on the program committee.   (my irc nick is kmoir (#releng) as is my email id at mozilla.com)

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Reminder: Release Engineering Special Issue submission deadline is August 1, 2014

Just a friendly reminder that the deadline for the Release Engineering Special Issue is August 1, 2014.  If you have any questions about the submission process or a topic that's you'd like to write about, the guest editors, including myself, are happy to help you!

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Mozilla pushes - June 2014

Here's June 2014's  analysis of the pushes to our Mozilla development trees. You can load the data as an HTML page or as a json file

Trends

This was another record breaking month with a total of 12534 pushes.  As a note of interest, this is is over double the number of pushes we had in June 2013. So big kudos to everyone who helped us scale our infrastructure and tooling.  (Actually we had 6,433 pushes in April 2013 which would make this less than half because June 2013 was a bit of a dip.  But still impressive :-)

Highlights

• 12534 pushes
• new record
• 418 pushes/day (average)
• new record
• Highest number of pushes/day: 662 pushes on June 5, 2014
• new record
• Highest 23.17 pushes/hour (average)
• new record

General Remarks

The introduction of Gaia-try in April has been very popular and comprised around 30% of pushes in June compared to 29% last month.

The Try branch itself consisted of around 38% of pushes.

The three integration repositories (fx-team, mozilla-inbound and b2g-inbound) account around 21% of all the pushes, compared to 22% in the previous month.

Records

June 2014 was the month with most pushes (12534 pushes)
June 2014 has the highest pushes/day average with 418 pushes/day
June 2014 has the highest average of "pushes-per-hour" is 23.17 pushes/hour
June 4th, 2014 had the highest number of pushes in one day with 662 pushes

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This week in Mozilla Releng - July 4, 2014

This is a special double issue of this week in releng. I was so busy in the last week that I didn't get a chance to post this last week.  Despite the fireworks for Canada Day and Independence Day,  Mozilla release engineering managed to close some bugs. 

Major highlights:

• Armen, although he works on Ateam now, made blobber uploads discoverable and blogged about it.  Blobber is a server and client side set of tools that allow Releng's test infrastructure to upload files without requiring to deploy ssh keys on them. 
• Callek and Coop, who served on buildduty during the past two weeks worked to address capacity issues with our test and build infrastructure.  We hit a record of 88,000 jobs yesterday which led to high pending counts.
• Kim is trying to address the backlog of Android 2.3 test jobs  by moving more test jobs to AWS from our inhouse hardware now that Geoff on the Ateam has found a suitable image.
• Rail switched jacuzzi EBS from magnetic to SSD.  Jacuzzis are similar pools of build machines  and switching their EBS storage from magnetic to SSD in AWS will improve build times.

 Completed work (resolution is 'FIXED'):

• Buildduty
• Stale slaverebooter lockfile
• please upload a new tp5n.zip to get a network access fix
• Please upload blessings to internal PyPI
• Please deploy newer version of blobuploader
• upload a new mobile_tp4.zip pageset to the 3 headed remote talos server
• Problem with cannot create debug link section
• B2G hamachi_eng_nightly failing with "Giving up on gecko git revision for 31de1a84b27f."
• increase disk size for AWS buildbot masters
• Please deploy newer version of blobuploader (1.2.1)
• b-2008-sm-0009 is unreachable
• Something wrong with b-2008-ix-002x slaves
• upload a talos pages to the 3 headed remote talos server to revision f9136c4bc616
• B2G bumper bot hasn't made any commits for 6+ hours
• Windows 8 test jobs pending on Try for coming up to 3 hours
• General Automation
• Need automatic hsts preload list updates on any branches based on Gecko 18 and later
• Make blobber uploads discoverable
• Provision enough in-house master capacity
• Disable mochitest-metro on Cedar
• Allow in-tree json for Gaia-Try to specify which Gecko build to use.
• Please do not use http://puppetagain.pub.build.mozilla.org for high-reliability Python installs
• [tracker] run Android 2.3 test jobs on EC2
• Perma-fail on Linux64 slaves - test_hosted.xul,test_packaged.xul,test_packaged_launch.xul | Error during test: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80520012 (NS_ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND) [nsIFileOutputStream.init]" nsresult: "0x80520012
• generate "flatfish" builds for B2G
• Add the build step or else process name to buildbot's generic command timed out failure strings
• [Dolphin] Create Dolphin builds for 1.4
• [Dolphin] Need a way to build Dolphin builds for 1.4
• Require more free space for android builds
• switch tst* EBS from magnetic to SSD
• Tooltool doesn't work on (at least) windows c-c
• Increase Android 2.3 mochitest chunks, for aws
• Monitor aws_stop_idle.py hungs
• Hazard failures with rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender]
• Add more tst-linux64 slaves
• Update Gu job to build Gaia with DESKTOP_SHIMS=0
• Please clobber bld-linux64-spot-015
• Configure elm for linux builds
• Use tooltool for l10n builds
• Please deploy newer version of blobber
• Race condition between builders that push updates to in-tree files
• Unschedule Goop everywhere but cedar
• Add hazards builds to ash branch
• Start doing mulet builds on Fig
• Terminate buildbot-master65 instance
• Decommission the ionmonkey tree
• switch jacuzzi EBS from magnetic to SSD
• create in-tree CA pinning preload list
• Loan Requests
• loan linux64 ec2 slave to jmaher
• Requesting a loaner machine b2g_ubuntu64_vm to diagnose bug 1017490
• loan gbrown a c3.xlarge to test reftests etc again in AWS
• Request Loan Machine for tst-linux64-spot
• Other
• Allow developers to access Android emulator AVDs
• Provide a Mozilla API key for desktop builds
• sign Thunderbird hot-fix testing addon
• No Firefox win32 l10n builds for mozilla-central since June 25th
• Platform Support
• Upload new version of xulrunner to tooltool
• Redirect runner logging output to /var/log/runner.log
• rc3.d/ symlinks should refresh on initscript updates for runner and buildbot
• Segmentation fault on gaia try server with pull request from bug 1017490
• Update version of pip installed on automation machines from 0.8.2 to 1.5.5
• address high pending count in in-house Linux64 test pool
• Release Automation
• Please disable the servo bors cronjob
• Need an update watershed in 29.0bN for beta channel
• Tree closure hooks for esr31
• Releases
• Sign the Firefox update hotfix (v20140527.01)
• Repos and Hooks
• Allow pushing Instantbird-only changes on a closed c-c- tree
• Create a script to import one Mercurial repository into a subdirectory of another, with linear history
• Add a repository hook to enforce new review requirements for changing .webidl files
• Tools
• update relman scripts based on notes from first usage
• Verify that trychooser's tryload is looking at the right names for pending jobs and adding them up into the correct buckets
• TryChooser conflicts with HTTPS Everywhere
• port b2g branching script to mozharness, with revision locking
• Update SlaveAPI sphynx docs to reflect recent changes
• Update tools/update-packaging/make_incremental_update.sh to allow passing Product Version and Channel ID
• Using slaveapi to reboot a machine on the slave health page results in "list index out of range" under 'output'
• loan jgriffin an AWS linux64 test box, and then bump up the instance cpu/ram til tests pass

In progress work (unresolved and not assigned to nobody):

• Balrog: Backend
• support comparison operators for matching version & buildID in rules
• Buildduty
• loan glandium and mshal a Linux ec2 instance
• Growing pending queues for tegras and time between jobs per tegra > 6 hours
• [tracking] Eliminate buildduty
• Investigate Windows 8 machines that are still out of action
• Reconfigs should be automatic, and scheduled via a cron job
• mountain-lion talos systems using the wrong basedir
• General Automation
• [Tracking] Cleanup And organize mobile (sut) code.
• end_to_end reconfig script should run its python unbuffered
• Provide B2G Emulator builds for Darwin x86
• Figure out the correct path setup and mozconfigs for automation-driven MSVC2013 builds
• Move emulator gaia-ui-tests on cedar from AWS to IX slaves
• [Meta] Some "Android 4.0 debug" tests fail
• Create mozilla-esr31 branch
• Normalize builder names
• [Meta] Fix + unhide broken testsuites or else turn them off to save capacity
• gaia-try: do a merge locally instead of using the pull request reference
• manage_instance_storage.py should consider root volume size
• fx desktop builds in mozharness
• Move Firefox Desktop repacks to use mozharness
• Add signing for firefox and org.mozilla.updater binaries on OSX
• ensure the timezone and time are set properly on tegras (and other devices)
• Partial update generation service
• Run desktop mochitests-browser-chrome on Ubuntu
• Get Mulet builds running on OSX on fig
• port buildapi to relengapi
• Do nightly builds with profiling disabled
• Tracking bug for 21-jul-2014 migration work
• dolphin full image size is incorrect in pvt build
• spidermonkey_build.py looks for gcc in two different places
• Attach a cost figure(in USD) to try reports
• Please add non-unified builds to mozilla-central
• Allow to install additional packages in mock
• Stop rebooting after every job
• Schedule Android 4.0 Debug reftests, crashtests, and robocop tests on all trunk trees and let them ride the trains
• revamp b2g upload configs
• Hazard builds uploading to wrong FTP dir
• Schedule Mnw on cedar on emulator-jb and emulator-kk
• We should stop using setup.sh in tooltool
• Touch CLOBBER on branches being uplifted
• reduce EBS writes by tweaking writeout
• Improve slaveapi logging
• Loan Requests
• loan windows 7 slave to jmaher
• loan linux32 (hardware) slave to jmaher
• Loan t-w732-ix-003, t-w732-ix-004 to Q
• Loan :sfink a linux64 b-linux64-hp-0024
• Need a bld-lion-r5 to test build times with SSD
• Request to borrow an r4 mini
• Other
• Identify next batch of locales which no longer need nightlies on m-c
• Decide and document how many B2G filesystem diffs we keep for updates
• Create a long term archive of opt+debug builds on M-I for Regression Hunting
• mozharness device mixin has various problems
• Locate and identify tegra-122, tegra-123, and tegra-161
• mozharness device_talosrunner has some minor issues
• Set up cron jobs to copy tinderbox-builds content to S3
• [Tracking bug] support git in production on parity with hg
• get a consistent story on graph server data per branch
• [tracking] infrastructure improvements
• Platform Support
• Stop update_shared_repos runner task from pulling Try
• Deploy NSIS 3.0a2 or MozillaBuild 1.9 (includes NSIS 3.0a2) to buildslaves
• [tracker] Stop testing on tegras
• evaluate mac cloud options
• b-2008-sm machines being incorrectly flagged as unreachable
• signing win64 builds is busted
• implement c3.xlarge slave class for Linux64 test spot instances
• Investigate alternative SSH daemon for Windows
• verify script called by mozharness for android devices doesn't reboot via mozpool
• Deploy hg.m.o/build/buildbot production-0.8 to non-windows buildslaves to pick up bug 961075
• disable tegras on 32 to ride the trains
• slave pre-flight tasks
• Tegra Cleanup should delete some additional files on the sdcard
• Cleanup org.mozilla.f3nn3c.PasswordsProvider in verify.py
• Release Automation
• release automation should update ship it at certain points
• Update channels for single locale Beta and Release builds of Firefox for Android 30 (and beyond)
• use a property other than speed to differentiate between slaves in slavealloc
• Add new table(s) to shipit database
• send e-mail to release-drivers when a build is requested through ship it
• Add a standalone process that listens to pulse for release related buildbot messages
• Add REST API entry point to shipit that allows shipit-agent to enter release data into shipit database
• Stop doing a recursive chmod on directories every time we upload to a candidates dir
• Releases
• Sign and dev deploy the Firefox update hotfix (v20140527.01) (v2)
• Releases: Custom Builds
• Remove Rambler config to inactive and remove builds from FTP
• Repos and Hooks
• Error when pushing to user repo: Sending messages to pulse.mozilla.org, Hook returned an exception: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'filerev'
• Change the webidl hook to allow commits authored by a DOM reviewer
• research if we can remove duplicate single head hg.m.o hook
• Tools
• Fix tools/update-packaging/common.sh for consistent behaviour across platforms
• Intermittent time travel in legacy vcs
• AWS Sanity Check lies about how long an instance was shut down for...
• Figure out tools versioning for partial generation
• tooltool upload should set file permissions to world readable
• tegra/panda health checks (verify.py) should not swallow exceptions
• Set up auto publish of doc index per Boston workweek agreement
• aws_create_instance should not be allowed to run forever
• mozharness mozilla-release merge day script
• Create a new landing page for releng
• mozharness mozilla-beta + mozilla-aurora merge day script
• slaveapi's shutdown_buildslave action doesn't cope well with a machine that isn't connected to buildbot
• self-serve agents' error handling needs more care
• Make mozharness use structured logging for marionette tests
• implement 'aws_create_instance' action in slaveapi
• [tracking] Implement a comprehensive slave health tool
• slaveapi should make use of dev staging inventory and mozdns/api/v1_dns
• Transplant tool (Hg to Hg) for sheriffs

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