Release and Deployments FY2026Q4 Planning and Roadmap review

Context

We are approaching FY26Q4 and it's time to start planning our epics/roadmap work for the Release and Deploy team. We have had a lot of important work come our way and have a few projects started in Q3 that will continue into Q4. We also have important upcoming events like the GA of Duo Agent Platform, rollout of Pulp, and Protocells initial rollout.

FY26 Q3 State Review

We worked on a lot and managed a lot of priorities. Amongst that, we got a lot of implementation done:

  1. We finished implementation of the tooling for earlier stable branch creation. That automation helps the monthly release tasks go faster and will hopefully rollout doing the branch creation earlier at a future point.

  2. We implemented tooling and process to be able to extend the maintenance policy for patches. Dev teams no longer need to submit backport exception issues. Official rollout and announcements are pending in a future epic.

  3. We made an improvement to Release Environments to make them more like a Self Managed environment using GET.

  4. We rolled out doing migrations, including Post Deploy Migrations in K8s-workloads. This will enable us to separately use containers for migrations and deprecate the use of the deploy-* VMs for executing migrations.

  5. We helped create a way for the Container Registry on GitLab.com to do post-deploy migrations via automation.

  6. We are continuing work for Protocells for GitLab.com:
    a. We helped get deploys going and got QA running for the test AWS cell.

    b. We are now making cells release management and tooling (tissue/ringctl) production ready.

  7. We started to help with Pulp transition, building out test infrastructure.

  8. We did address some tech debt items:

    a. Improve Slack warning message when a rollback includes security or high severity fixes

    b. Patch blog post refactoring

Upcoming focus areas

  1. Pulp rollout
  2. Protocells - continue making cells release management and tooling (tissue/ringctl) production ready.
  3. Assist with TBD tasks for Duo Agent Platform rollout/release plan for self managed (background gdoc)
  4. Assist with Rails 7.2 rollout.

Further ideas

  1. Faster Patch releases
  2. Better path for new subcomponents in self managed - TBD
  3. Support higher deployment frequency for GitLab.com's Zoekt component
  4. what else?

Discussion Topics

Please share your thoughts on:

  1. Priority Areas: What areas (from above or new) should be our top focus for Q4?
  2. Resource Allocation: How should we balance ongoing work vs. new initiatives?
  3. Dependencies: What external dependencies or blockers should we plan around?
  4. Success Metrics: How should we measure success for Q3 initiatives?
  5. Risk Mitigation: What risks should we plan for and how can we mitigate them?

Timeline

  • Idea Submission Deadline: [Date - 2025-10-24]
  • Initial Quarterly Plan Draft: [Date - 2025-10-31]
  • Final Quarterly Plan Approval: [Date - 2025-11-7]

Team Input Needed

@gitlab-org/software-delivery/release-and-deploy please review this planning framework and share:

  • Your thoughts on the proposed focus areas
  • Any additional initiatives you think we should consider
  • Concerns or constraints we should factor into planning
  • Ideas for improving our planning process
Edited by Dave Smith