Enable Archive of old builds

To help with CI/CD can scale we added Deprecate retention of builds older than 3 months

This issue it to battle-test this feature and figure out if we should proceed with the implementation of data removal. Today, we only disallow the actions, but this does not affect the data.

The proposal came from the assumption that people rarely need to retry old jobs. In most cases it is broken anyway, as branches quickly get outdated and a lot of CI scripts do use GIT_DEPTH: which limits the ability to fetch older revisions.

Since this has UX impact on the system as mentioned as part of https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/50939, we should gradually roll out this feature to ensure what workflows gonna be broken.

I propose that we enable this feature on GitLab.com setting the data retention period in these granular steps:

  1. For 45 days lets start with setting it to 1 year,
  2. After we conclude and see no negative impact set it to 6 months,
  3. After another 45 days (three months since 1.) set it to 3 months and we will build controls to recycle old data older than a set period.

What is affected by this feature?

  1. Ability to retry and play jobs older than given period,
  2. Ability to retry and rollback deployments older than given period,

What is not affected?

  1. Ability to view traces/jobs/pipelines/deployments,
  2. Ability to download artifacts, they have a separate retention period,
  3. Ability to re-run whole pipeline from the past configuration.

Is this UX complete?

  1. Partially, we implemented the simplest indicator on Job page to show that job is archived,
  2. We look for additional informations what might be missing to improve user-flow, ex.: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53536
Edited by James Heimbuck