Fedora 24 released on all architectures simultaneously!!

So for the first time ever we’ve released Fedora 24 across both primary and alternate architectures pretty much simultaneously! That’s the three primary architectures, x86_64, ARMv7 and i686, plus the alternate architectures of aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le and s390x. This is the first time we’ve ever released SEVEN architectures on the same day!

Fedora 24 from a Release Engineering perspective has been fairly momentous, we’ve made the single biggest change to our tooling that composes the release since Fedora Core and Fedora Extras was merged in Fedora 7! The plans for this change had been long discussed and first started to move back in the Fedora 21 cycle with the hope it could be implemented in Fedora 22…. boy were we wrong! But on the flip slide, while it’s still not perfect, it has massively improved the process for the releases. We now FINALLY have a full compose every single night! No more Test Composes! It now means QA can automate tests against any bit of the compose output, it means the installer team can see the results of their changes the next day. For the average user this has no material visible impact, for those much closer into the process it has a hugely positive impact!

From the alternate “secondary” architecture perspective I’ve ticked of a massive amount of “goal check boxes” that I made for myself when I joined this role almost two years ago.

My big ticket item was “make the release process like primary”. Our release process was a lot more manual than “primary” but we had also a lot less “features”. Well with this release neither are now true. We’re not 100% of the primary process, but the difference is tiny. We have a full nightly compose now, like primary, where previously we basically had a “newRepo” process we now have a full installer stack with network and iso installs produced. This in itself is a massive improvement! To this we add docker to aarch64 and Power64, cloud to aarch64 (and more automation of cloud to Power64), and initial “tech preview” disk images to aarch64 for Single Board Computers (I’m sorry I really did want to nail down this feature but even I have to sleep!) like the Pine64.

Some of the “smaller” tick box improvements to non primary arches is that we’re now fully 100% ansible run for the aarch64 and Power64 infrastructure, and only have a few minor bits to work out for s390x. This means from the back end everything is 100% like primary and orchestrated as such, the hubs all looks the same and the experience is consistent. Changes are deployed simultaneously and hence consistently. YAY automation! We’ve also simplified the way the secondary content gets to the mirrors so it’s more consistent and faster!

On the not x86 architecture front we’ve got a whole bunch more exciting features planned, and improvements to make, for the Fedora 25 cycle and beyond, some of which will begin happening very soon. Watch this space, the second half of the year looks to me to be just as frantic as the first!!