Migrating to Taskcluster: work underway!

Mozilla’s build and test infrastructure has relied on Buildbot as the backbone of our systems for many years. Asking around, I heard that we started using Buildbot around 2008. The time has come for a change!

Many of the people working on migrating from Buildbot to Taskcluster gathered all together for the first time to talk about migration this morning. (A recording of the meeting is available)

The goal of this work is to shut down Buildbot and identify a timeline. Our first goal post is to eliminate the Buildbot Scheduler by moving build production entirely into TaskCluster, and scheduling tests in TaskCluster.

Today, most FirefoxOS builds and tests are in Taskcluster. Nearly everything else for Firefox is driven by Buildbot.

Our current tracker bug is ‘Buildbot -> TaskCluster transition‘. At a high level, the big projects underway are:

We have quite a few things to figure out in the Windows and Mac OS X realm where we’re interacting with hardware, and some work is left to be done to support Windows in AWS. We’re planning to get more clarity on the work that needs to be done there next week.

The bugs identified seem tantalizingly close to describing most of the issues that remain in porting our builds. The plan is to have a timeline documented for builds to be fully migrated over by Whistler! We are also working on migrating tests, but for now believe the Buildbot Bridge will help us get tests out of the Buildbot scheduler, even if we continue to need Buildbot masters for a while. An interesting idea about using runner to manage hardware instead of the masters was raised during the meeting that we’ll be exploring further.

If you’re interested in learning more about TaskCluster and how to use it, Chris Cooper is running a training on Monday June 1 at 1:30pm PT.

Ping me on IRC, Twitter or email if you have questions!