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Shipping large software to end-user devices is a complicated process. Shipping large software securely to end-user devices is even more complicated. Signing the things that ship to end-user devices is one of those complications, and it gets even more complicated when you sign thousands of artifacts per day. Mozilla has been signing Firefox in some form beginning with Firefox 1.0. This began with…
This past year has been a big and exciting one for Balrog. We made the transition to Docker , migrated to new infrastructure , participated in Google's Summer of Code for the first time, bootstrapped System Addon updates , and much, much more . In total, 129 tickets were closed, with a significant portion of those being done by volunteers. I'd like to highlight a few things in particular.…
I want to tell you about an important new Balrog feature that we're working on. But I also want to tell you about how we planned it, because I think that part is even more interesting that the project itself. The Project Balrog is Mozilla’s update server. It is responsible for deciding which updates to deliver for a given update request. Because updates deliver arbitrary code to users this means…
The past month has seen some significant and exciting improvements to Balrog. We've had the usual flow of feature work, but also a lot of improvements to the infrastructure and Docker image structure. Let's have a look at all the great work that's been done! Core Features Most recently, two big changes have landed that allow us to use multifile updates for SystemAddons. This type of update…
The pace of Balrog development has been increasing since the beginning of 2016. We're now at a point where we push new code to production nearly every week, and I'd like to start highlighting all the great work that's being done. The past week was particularly busy, so let's get into it! The most exciting thing to me is Meet Mangukiya's work on adding support for substituting some runtime…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 updates. It is an SQLAlchemy based app, but because of its huge importance it became clear in the early stages of development that we had a couple of requirements that went beyond those of most other…