We're done!

Over the past few weeks we've hit a few major milestones in our project to migrate all of Firefox's CI and release automation to taskcluster.

Firefox 60 and higher are now 100% on taskcluster!

Tests

At the end of March, our Release Operations and Project Integrity teams finished migrating Windows tests onto new hardware machines, all running taskcluster. That work was later uplifted to beta so that CI automation on beta would also be completely done using taskcluster.

This marked the last usage of buildbot for Firefox CI.

Periodic updates of blocklist and pinning data

Last week we switched off the buildbot versions of the periodic update jobs. These jobs keep the in-tree versions of blocklist, HSTS and HPKP lists up to date.

These were the last buildbot jobs running on trunk branches.

Partner repacks

And to wrap things up, yesterday the final patches landed to migrate partner repacks to taskcluster. Firefox 60.0b14 was built yesterday and shipped today 100% using taskcluster.

A massive amount of work went into migrating partner repacks from buildbot to taskcluster, and I'm really proud of the whole team for pulling this off.

So, starting today, Firefox 60 and higher will be completely off taskcluster and not rely on buildbot.

It feels really good to write that :)

We've been working on migrating Firefox to taskcluster for over three years! Code archaeology is hard, but I think the first Firefox jobs to start running in Taskcluster were the Linux64 builds, done by Morgan in bug 1155749.

Into the glorious future

It's great to have migrated everything off of buildbot and onto taskcluster, and we have endless ideas for how to improve things now that we're there. First we need to spend some time cleaning up after ourselves and paying down some technical debt we've accumulated. It's a good time to start ripping out buildbot code from the tree as well.

We've got other plans to make release automation easier for other people to work with, including doing staging releases on try(!!), making the nightly release process more similar to the beta/release process, and for exposing different parts of the release process to release management so that releng doesn't have to be directly involved with the day-to-day release mechanics.