New Services & Major Upgrades Planned for This Release

What new products, applications, services, etc have we built since Eucalyptus?

The following repositories now use ESLint with eslint-config-edx to enforce a JavaScript coding style:
- edx-platform
- edx-ui-toolkit
- ux-pattern-library
- edx-analytics-dashboard

Installation changes

What has changed in the devops/configuration world? Are there manual steps needed to move from Eucalyptus to Ficus?

Mongo will be upgraded to at least 3.0 and will switch to using the Wired Tiger storage engine. This storage engine will not transparently read MMAPv1 files from 2.6 and will require a dump/restore most likely.ElasticSearch
Migrations will be upgraded, probably to 1.5 which is what we use in production. This will coincide with changes to the forums service to support the newer version.need to be faked for projects that use the Python Social Auth package. This includes all of our IDAs. See https://github.com/omab/python-social-auth/issues/991 for complete details.
In reference to https://github.com/edx/cs_comments_service/pull/192; "migrate-009-comment_thread-author-created_at-indexes.js" needs to be run to create newly added index.
Forums are now configured with a ConfigurationModel (Toby did the work). There should need to be no special action taken.
NodeJS will be upgraded to 6.9.2 LTS. There should be no special action necessary.
Ansible has been upgraded to version 2.2.

Any unusual things changed in the product that adopters or developers should know about?

Preview Language options changed from query parametes (preview-lang) to a form that requires login on LMS and Studio. This form can be found by appending /update_lang/ to the root URLs of either site.

The old login/registration flow has been deprecated, and is replaced by the Logistration pages.
Programs is still supported, but will be replaced in the next release (Ginkgo)

Pull requests to cherry-pick onto Ficus:

https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/3718 Change the default XQUEUE_RABBITMQ_TLS value to false
- cherry-picked as https://github.

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