FirefoxCI cluster upgrades#

As of H1 2022, the Taskcluster, Cloudops, and Releng teams have committed to rolling out upgrades to the FirefoxCI cluster at a regular cadence.

Process#

We now have a regular cadence of scheduled upgrades, as noted in the Public - FirefoxCI Cluster Taskcluster Upgrades calendar.

Several days before:

  • Determine which upgrades and/or maintenance procedures are needed. Ideally we have baked the target Taskcluster version in the Staging and Community, and tested any changes that might negatively affect the FirefoxCI cluster.

  • If there are any changes that are in question, ideally the knowledgeable developers are ready to respond during/after the upgrade, and/or we have a rollback plan in place.

  • We track JIRA tickets at the Deploying to FirefoxCI mana page.

  • We remind everyone about these upgrades by sending out emails like this dev-platform email, and checking with Relman before the upgrade to make sure there are no releases in-flight.

Minor version upgrade process#

As of 2022.04.13, we have been successful rolling out minor version Taskcluster upgrades without a tree closure. We also managed to upgrade the database instance RAM during such a non-tree-closure window, which made the DB unavailable for ~10-15min. This only resulted in ~2 failed tasks, which went green on rerun. So if we want to roll out a minor version upgrade or other short-term outage maintenance tasks:

  • Check with Relman in matrix #releaseduty before proceeding (Releaseduty)

  • Roll out the maintenance fixes and cluster upgrades (Cloudops team)

  • Check on smoketests (Taskcluster team)

  • Check treeherder and ask Sheriffs if there are any broken tasks (Releaseduty)

Major version upgrade process#

If there is a major version upgrade, or other maintenance/migration that will have larger side effects than a few busted tasks in a half hour of maintenance, let’s follow these steps:

  • Identify the potential issues we might hit post-upgrade/maintenance/migration

  • Test in taskcluster staging

  • Create a rollback + testing plan

  • Send an email like this dev-platform email noting that this is a tree-closure upgrade several days before, update the Public - FirefoxCI Cluster Taskcluster Upgrades calendar (Releaseduty).

  • Close trees 2+hours before (Sheriffs or Releaseduty)

  • Check with Relman in matrix #releaseduty before proceeding (Releaseduty)

  • Roll out the maintenance fixes and cluster upgrades (Cloudops team)

  • Check on smoketests (Taskcluster team)

  • Check treeherder and ask Sheriffs if there are any broken tasks (Releaseduty)

  • Reopen trees (Sheriffs or Releaseduty)

  • Respond to the first email saying the upgrade is finished (Releaseduty)