Here’s what happened on the MozMEAO SRE team from July 11th - July 18th.
Current work
Kubernetes
basket, snippets, snippets-stats, and careershave been deployed to our Frankfurt cluster. Once some last minute tests pass, we’ll enable these applications via updates to our Route 53 traffic policies.
Decommissioning old infrastructure
We’re planning on decommissioning our Deis 1 infrastructure starting with Ireland, as our apps are all running on Kubernetes in multiple regions. Once the Ireland cluster has been shut down, we’ll continue on to our Portland cluster.
Additionally, we’ll be scaling down our Virginia cluster, as our apps are being moved to regions with lower latencies for the majority of our users.
Here’s what happened in June in
Kuma,
the engine of
MDN Web Docs:
Shipped the New Design to Beta Testers
Added KumaScript macro tests
Continued MDN data projects
Shipped tweaks and fixes
Here’s the plan for July:
Continue the redesign
Experiment with on-site interactive examples
Update localization of macros
Ship the sample database
Done in June
Shipped the new design to beta testers
This month, we revealed some long-planned changes. First, MDN is
focusing on web docs,
which includes changing our identity from “Mozilla Developer Network” to
“MDN Web Docs”. Second, we’re shipping a
new design to beta users,
to reflect
Mozilla’s new brand identity
as well as the MDN Web Docs brand.
Stephanie Hobson did a tremendous amount
of work over
26 Kuma PRs
and
2 KumaScript PRs
to launch a beta of the updated design on wiki pages. A lot of dead code has
been removed, and non-beta users continue to get the current design.
Schalk Neethling reviewed the PRs as
fast as they were created, including checking the rendering in supported
browsers. Our beta users have provided a lot of feedback and found some bugs,
which Stephanie has been triaging,
tracking,
and fixing.
This work continues in July, with an update to the homepage and other pages.
When we’ve completed the redesign, we’ll ship the update to all users. If you
want to see it early,
opt-in as a beta tester.
Added KumaScript Macro Tests
Macros used to be tested manually, in production. After moving the
macros to GitHub, they were still tested manually, but in the development
environment. In June, Ryan Johnson added an
automated testing framework, and tests for five macros, in
PR 204. This allows us to
mock the Kuma APIs needed for rendering, and to test macros in
different locales and situations. This will help us refine and refactor
macros in the future.
The tools and processes are updating as well, to keep up with the activity.
browser-compat-data gained a linter in
PR 240.
mdn-browser-compat-data’s npm package
was bumped to version 0.0.2, and then 0.0.3.
mdn-data was released as 1.0.0.
We’re loading the browser-compat-data from the NPM package in production,
and hope to start loading the data NPM package soon.
We’re happy with the progress on the data projects. There’s a lot of work
remaining to convert the data on MDN, and also a lot of work to automate the
process so that changes are reflected in production as quickly as possible.
Some of the styling for the article pages is shared across other pages, but
there is more work to do to complete the redesign. Up next is the homepage,
which will change to reflect our new focus on documenting the open web. Other
pages will need further work to make the site consistent. When we and the beta
testers are mostly happy, we’ll ship the design to all MDN visitors, and then
remove the old design code.
Experiment with On-site Interactive Examples
We’re preparing some interactive examples, so that MDN readers can learn by
adjusting the code without leaving the site. We’re still working out the details
of serving these examples at production scale, so we’re limiting the July
release to beta users. You can follow the work at
mdn/interactive-examples.
Update Localization of Macros
Currently, KumaScript macros use in-macro localization strings and
utility functions like
getLocalString
to localize output for three to five languages. Meanwhile, user interface strings in
Kuma are translated in
Pontoon into 57 languages. We’d
like to use a similar workflow for strings in macros, and will get started on
this process in July.
Ship the Sample Database
The Sample Database has been promised every month since October 2016, and
has slipped every month. We almost had to break the tradition, but we can
say again it will ship next month.
PR 4248, adding the
scrape_document command, shipped in June. The final code,
PR 4076, is in review, and should
be merged in July.
We didn’t do anything to optimize for HTTP/2, we just enabled it.
We’re seeing performance improvements.
You don’t have to get ready before you start using HTTP/2
While doing research to see if turning it on without doing any optimizations was
a good idea I read things like:
“It also means that all of those HTTP1 performance techniques are harmful.
They will make a HTTP2 website slower, not faster - don’t use them.” -
HTTP2 for front-end web developers
Which suggest that enabling HTTP/2 on a site optimized for HTTP/1.1 could result
in a slower site.
A better way to interpret those quotes is:
If you optimize for HTTP/1.1 and turn on HTTP/2 your site will not be as fast
as it could be - but it might still be faster!
On MDN we concatenate a lot of our files but we don’t concatenate all of them.
For example, our article pages have 9 different files coming from our CDN. I
thought we could benefit from a bit of HTTP/2’s multiplexing and header
compression. And we did. You can see the DNS lookup time drop off in this
waterfall from Pingdom:
Some numbers
Overall, our tests don’t show a huge improvement in page load speed but there
are small improvements for everyone, and a real improvement for users located
far away from our servers. (Hi Australia and China!)
I tried to segment our users in Google Analytics to make sure we did not have
a negative impact on users relying on HTTP/1.1 and… I couldn’t find enough
users to draw any conclusions. MDN is lucky like that. (It’s possible the IE11
test in the table above is on Windows 7 and does not support HTTP/2, but
WebPageTest doesn’t identify the OS.) In theory, older browsers
should not be affected because the protocol falls back to HTTP/1.1.
There was a lot of variation in the page speed data I examined. I recommend
running your before and after benchmark tests multiple times on multiple days
so you can take an average. Try to wait a week before drawing conclusions
from your analytics data as well.
In a perfect world you don’t increase the amount of code on your site or
invalidate anyone’s caches in the sample time period, but we don’t
develop in a perfect world.
This involves changing our hosting services, not a small task, and changing our
pages to serve the same content to all logged out users.
Decrease asset size by removing support for older browsers.
If you think working on MDN was a great job because we have very modern browser
support requirements, remember we’re also working on a 10 year old code
base.
Here’s what happened on the MozMEAO SRE team from June 13th - June 20th.
Current work
Static site hosting
The irlpodcast site now has a staging environment also hosted in S3 with CloudFront. Additionally, Jenkins has been updated to deploy to staging and production via git push.
We’re going to move viewsourceconf.org from Kubernetes to S3 and CloudFront hosting. Production and staging environments have been provisioned, but we’ll need to update Jenkins to push changes to these new environments.
Our DataDog, New Relic and MIG DaemonSets have been configured to use Kubernetes tolerations to schedule pods on master nodes. This allows us to capture metrics from K8s master nodes in additional to worker nodes.
Frankfurt Kubernetes cluster provisioning
Work continues to enable our apps in the new Frankfurt Kubernetes cluster. In addition, we’re working on automating our app installs as must as possible.
MDN
ElasticSearch will be upgraded to 2.4 in SCL3 production, June 21 11 AM PST
