Hello from Platform Engineering Ops! Once a month we highlight one of our projects to help the Mozilla community discover a useful tool or an interesting contribution opportunity. This month's project is Balrog! What is it? Balrog is the software that runs the server side component of the update system used by Firefox and other Mozilla products. It is the successor to AUS (Application Update Service), which did not scale to our current needs nor allow us to adapt to more recent business requi...| Ben Hearsum
Earlier this year I spent some time modernizing and improving Balrog's toolchain. One of my goals in doing so was to switch from Travis CI to Taskcluster both to give us more flexibility in our CI configuration, as well as help dogfood Taskcluster-Github. One of the most challenging aspects of this was how to build and push our Docker image, and I'm hoping this post will make it easier for other folks who want to do the same in the future. The Task Definition Let's start by breaking down Task...| Ben Hearsum
This past quarter I spent some time modernizing Balrog's toolchain to make it more approachable. We've switched from Vagrant to Docker, cleaned up setup.py, started using tox, and updated the sample data included in the repo. At the same time, I started identifying some good first bugs, and put together a proposal for a Summer of Code project. I feel very lucky that this work has paid off so quickly. There's been great interest in the Summer of Code project, and we've had 5 new volunteers sub...| Ben Hearsum
When we ship new versions of Firefox we do our best to avoid introducing new bugs or crashes, especially those that affect large numbers of users. One of the strategies we use to accomplish this is to ship new versions to a subset of people before shipping to everyone. We call this a "throttled rollout", and it's something we've been doing for many years. The tricky part of this is getting the new version to enough users to have a representative sample size without overshooting our target. Ou...| Ben Hearsum
Balrog is one of the more crucial systems that Release Engineering works on. Many of our automated builds send data to it and all Firefox installations in the wild regularly query it to look for updat| Ben Hearsum
At Fable, we're committed to digital inclusion for all. Our Community, comprising individuals with disabilities, actively contributes to usability testing, a vital part of enhancing digital accessibility. This report delves into our Community's unique perspectives, challenges, and preferences in the digital realm.| Fable