Increase gitlab-pages authCookieSessionTimeout to 60m

Production Change

Change Summary

See gitlab-org/gitlab#586329 (closed):

The 401 error page can be confusing for customers. Even if they have an active auth session through their auth provider, the error page does not make it clear that they just have a stale session and need to try again. Additionally, while a 401 unauthorized response is technically correct, a user might misinterpret as similar to 403 forbidden and assume that they don't have access to the resource.

In short, spending more than 10 minutes doing an SSO loop through Pages lands the user at a 401 with absolutely no recourse: e.g. you step away from your desk after clicking a link to a private Pages instance, come back to find a login screen, you log in, you get a very raw 401 with no option other than to try hitting back a bunch of times to remember what you were doing.

There's no simple solution due to the complicated authentication flow for Pages (see gitlab-org/gitlab#586329 (comment 3077614901)), so we've decided to try adjusting the cookie timeout from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. We'll see if the current rate of about 1500 errors of this kind logged per day falls to determine if it was successful.

We have an MR for the change open at gprd: increase gitlab-pages authCookieSessionTi... (gitlab-com/gl-infra/k8s-workloads/gitlab-com!5174 - merged).

We have already deployed the change to pre (gitlab-com/gl-infra/k8s-workloads/gitlab-com!5139 (merged)) and gstg (gitlab-com/gl-infra/k8s-workloads/gitlab-com!5171 (merged)) and tested it successfully: we can hit a private Pages site, get redirected to login, wait more than 10 minutes, complete the login, and make it all the way back to the page we wanted to see.

Change Details

  1. Services Impacted - GitLab Pages
  2. Change Technician - @gsgl
  3. Change Reviewer - @gsgl
  4. Scheduled Date and Time (UTC in format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM) - 2026-03-02 04:30
  5. Time tracking - 6min
  6. Downtime Component - n/a

Important

If your change involves scheduled maintenance, add a step to set and unset maintenance mode per our runbooks. This will make sure SLA calculations adjust for the maintenance period.

Preparation

Note

The following checklists must be done in advance, before setting the label changescheduled

Change Reviewer checklist

C4 C3 C2 C1:

  • Check if the following applies:
    • The scheduled day and time of execution of the change is appropriate.
    • The change plan is technically accurate.
    • The change plan includes estimated timing values based on previous testing.
    • The change plan includes a viable rollback plan.
    • The specified metrics/monitoring dashboards provide sufficient visibility for the change.

C2 C1:

  • Check if the following applies:
    • The complexity of the plan is appropriate for the corresponding risk of the change. (i.e. the plan contains clear details).
    • The change plan includes success measures for all steps/milestones during the execution.
    • The change adequately minimizes risk within the environment/service.
    • The performance implications of executing the change are well-understood and documented.
    • The specified metrics/monitoring dashboards provide sufficient visibility for the change.
      • If not, is it possible (or necessary) to make changes to observability platforms for added visibility?
    • The change has a primary and secondary SRE with knowledge of the details available during the change window.
    • The change window has been agreed with Release Managers in advance of the change. If the change is planned for APAC hours, this issue has an agreed pre-change approval.
    • The labels blocks deployments and/or blocks feature-flags are applied as necessary.

Change Technician checklist

  • The Change Criticality has been set appropriately and requirements have been reviewed.
  • The change plan is technically accurate.
  • The rollback plan is technically accurate and detailed enough to be executed by anyone with access.
  • This Change Issue is linked to the appropriate Issue and/or Epic
  • Change has been tested in staging and results noted in a comment on this issue.
  • A dry-run has been conducted and results noted in a comment on this issue.
  • The change execution window respects the Production Change Lock periods.
  • Once all boxes above are checked, mark the change request as scheduled: /label ~"change::scheduled"
  • For C1 and C2 change issues, the change event is added to the GitLab Production calendar by the change-scheduler bot. It is schedule to run every 2 hours.
  • For C1 and C2 change issues, Platform Leadership provides approval with the platform_leadership_approved label on the issue. Mention @gitlab-org/saas-platforms/change-review-leadership in this issue with a reference to review guidelines to get approval and provide visibility to all infrastructure managers.
  • For C1, C2, or blocks deployments change issues, confirm with Release managers that the change does not overlap or hinder any release process (In #production channel, mention @release-managers and this issue and await their acknowledgment.)
  • For C1 change issues or C2 change issues happening during weekend, SREs on-call must be informed at least 2 weeks in advance. Check the incident.io GitLab.com Production EOC schedule to find who will be on-call at the scheduled day and time.

Detailed steps for the change

Pre-execution steps

Note

The following steps should be done right at the scheduled time of the change request. The preparation steps are listed below.

  • Make sure all tasks in Change Technician checklist are done
  • For C1 and C2 change issues, the SRE on-call has been informed prior to change being rolled out.
    • The SRE on-call provided approval with the eoc_approved label on the issue.
  • For C1, C2, or blocks deployments change issues, Release managers have been informed prior to change being rolled out. (In #production channel, mention @release-managers and this issue and await their acknowledgment.)
  • There are currently no active incidents that are severity1 or severity2
  • If the change involves doing maintenance on a database host, an appropriate silence targeting the host(s) should be added for the duration of the change.

Change steps - steps to take to execute the change

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 1

Rollback

Rollback steps - steps to be taken in the event of a need to rollback this change

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 5

Monitoring

Key metrics to observe

Edited by Gonzalo Servat