Fabian as Acting PM for Memory/Database groups - Handover issue
Overview
Fabian will be transitioning to Acting PM for the Database and Memory groups, taking over from Josh Lambert as Acting PM.
This is expected to continue until:
- We hire a Distribution PM, at which point Josh Lambert may pick back up these duties
- We create a vacancy and fill the role of PM for these two groups
Important pages
- Enablement group engineering page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/database/
- We do not have a category or group strategy at this time
Memory Group
- Memory group engineering page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/memory/
- All of the important links are on this page, Roadmap, Milestone board, etc.
- We do not have a category or group strategy at this time
- Memory 13.7 Planning issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/memory-team/team-tasks/-/issues/69
Database Group
- Database group engineering page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/database/
- All of the important links are on this page, Roadmap, Milestone board, etc.
- Database 13.7 Planning issue: gitlab-org/database-team/team-tasks#104 (closed)
Memory group focus
Going forward, the Memory group will be focusing nearly exclusively on reducing the memory requirements of GitLab. The goal is to enable GitLab to run well on a machine with 1.8GB of RAM.
The reason for this focus is two fold:
- We have not found any major levers to pull to significantly improve performance on the backend. Rather it is many small changes across the entire product that are required.
- There is a risk of disruption from below, if GitLab continues to consume more and more memory with increasingly higher system requirements. This can provide room for other DevOps tools to gain momentum and potentially disrupt GitLab, or impact the community.
There are two relevant epics for this focus:
- Week-long discovery sprint: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/memory-team/-/epics/2
- Longer term epic: gitlab-org&448 (closed)
Finally, we are also wrapping up our work on the dynamic image resizing service. While this is running on GitLab.com, it is not yet on self-managed. We need to be comfortable with the impact, and then determine the best way to enable. Epic: gitlab-org&3822
Database group focus
The database group is primarily focused on a few key items:
- Implementing migration tests in CI, so that we can be confident we can upgrade and downgrade if an error is detected in Production. Further, we can hopefully catch these prior to production as well: gitlab-org/gitlab#263309 (closed). We have had multiple incidents in production recently due to migrations, and not being able to roll them back confidently has been a complicating factor. (Along with the incident in the first place)
- Providing Developers with access to production-like data: gitlab-org/database-team&3 (closed). This is to shift-left database testing, so engineers can better understand how their SQL queries will perform on very large instances, to further accelerate development and reduce incidents.
- Continue to work on the partitioning documentation/tools: gitlab-org&3946. We plan to partition the
events
table, which is a large and complex table. If we can prove that this can be done, and create the tooling/docs necessary, we feel confident we can then hand further partitioning work over to relevant product groups.
Database PM Intern
Yannis will be starting a PM internship soon for the Database group. We should write up a planning issue to kickoff the internship, and establish what the general goals and work will be: gitlab-org/database-team/team-tasks#105 (closed).