CIDuty
Manifesto
The buildduty manifesto describes the team responsibilities in a nutshell.
What is buildduty?
Every month, there is one person from the Release Engineering (releng) team dedicated to helping out developers with releng-related issues. This person will be available during his or her regular work hours for the whole month. This is similar to the sheriff role that rotates through the sheriffing team . To avoid confusion, the releng sheriff position is known as "buildduty."
Who is on buildduty? (schedule)
The person on buildduty should have 'buildduty' appended to their IRC nick, and should be available in the #developers, #releng, and #buildduty IRC channels.
Mozilla Releng Buildduty Schedule (Google Calendar|iCal|XML)
Buildduty not around?
It happens, especially outside of standard North American working hours (0600-1800 PT). Please open a bug under these circumstances.
Buildduty priorities
How should I make myself available for duty?
- Add 'buildduty' to your IRC nick
- Be available in the following IRC channels (at least): #developers, #releng, and #buildduty (as well as #mozbuild of course)
- also useful to be in #mobile and #ateam
- if you are in the middle of an outage, or need IT help, it is useful to be in #moc, #infra, and #sysadmins.
What should I take care of?
Outages
When things fail, getting systems and services stood back up again is buildduty's top priority. Note: this doesn't mean you need to do all the work yourself. For big outages, rope in whatever help you need: domain experts from releng, managers, netops, relops...whoever.
The Dealing with Outages wiki has more instructions.
Developer Requests
Aside from dealing with service outages, responding promptly to developer requests is the most important part of buildduty.
Developer requests will come via bugzilla in the form of new bugs, or may come as “pings” in IRC. Buildduty is expected to be the first point-of-contact for these requests to avoid interrupts to the rest of the team. IRC pings should be translated into bugs once the essence of the request in understood. Bugs should then be triaged into the proper component, and appropriate engineers cc-ed. If the work is actionable by buildduty and the work won't interfere with the completion of other duties, then buildduty should fix the issue.
Daily
Buildduty Bug Triage
The Buildduty report (generated hourly) should be your starting point for triage.
Note: Use the "View list in bugzilla" links in the buildduty report to navigate the bugs more easily.
At the top, it lists unassigned bugs for loan requests. You should try to keep this queue empty to make sure developers are unblocked. The wiki has instructions for how to loan a machine.
After loans are taken care of, make sure that bugs in the "No dependencies" section get dependencies filed, e.g. diagnosis bug, decomm bug, etc. The specific next steps will depend on the issue: Release Engineering How-Tos.
Do the same for bugs in the "All dependencies resolved" section to make sure the next action is taken (re-image, decomm, return to production, etc). Again, the specific next steps will depend on the issue: Release Engineering How-Tos.
Note: systemic issues (e.g. test failures that require further investigation) should *not* stay in the buildduty bugzilla component. It may be OK for you to take the bug and work on it depending on how much time you have, but generally these types of bugs should be moved to a more-appropriate component (e.g. General Automation) once buildduty has triaged them.
Alerts
Aside from the buildduty report, there may also be unacknowledged nagios alerts or SNS alerts from papertrail in the #buildduty IRC channel. Deal with them, filing bugs as needed: Release Engineering How-Tos.
Infrastructure performance
In addition to the individual slave bugs tackled in triage above, there may be systemic issues that need investigating. The Infrastructure performance wiki has more details about how to do this, and links to the wiki page for how to deal with high pending counts.
Semi-Daily
- Reconfigs
- Run reconfigs (every day or two days) for other release engineers. Reconfigs are automated now, so this is usually just a matter of merging the relevant repositories to production.
- Review logs in papertrail
- We have SNS alerts for most known issues in papertrail. The alerts will appear in the #buildduty IRC channel. Buildduty should log into papertrail a few times a week (M/W/F) to check for new issues that are *not* covered by alerts. New alerts should be setup for these issues.
Weekly
- Review AWS instances that have 'Unknown State/Type' or have been 'stopped for a while'
- When:
- Once a week. Traditionally this has been done on Friday.
- How:
- check the AWS sanity logs in papertrail
- for each host under heading "Unknown State", "Unknown Type"
- follow steps in dealing with instances with unknown state or type
- for each host under heading "Stopped For A While"
- follow steps in dealing with instances that have been stopped for a while
- When:
Others
There is a long list of other, less-frequent duties that buildduty can assist with.
Useful Links
- Slave Health
- Build Dashboard Main Page
- You can get JSON dumps for people to analyze by adding
&format=json
- You can get JSON dumps for people to analyze by adding
- Public "How To" documents
- Private "How To" documents
Standard Bugs
- For IT bugs that are marked "infra only", yet still need to be readable by RelEng, it is not enough to add release@ alias - people get updates but not able to comment or read prior comments. Instead, cc the following:
- :bhearsum, :Callek, :catlee, :coop, :hwine, :jlund, :kmoir, :mrrrgn, :nthomas, :rail
- :Tomcat, :RyanVM, :KWierso