2023-04-05: GitLab.com deployments during Hard PCL

Production Change

Change Summary

This CR is to plan and document approvals for a limited number of deployments and post-deployment migrations to take place during the ongoing Hard PCL.

GitLab.com typically receives between 100-200 changes per day. With our normal deployment schedule, we're able to deploy around 5 times per day. This keeps deployment sizes manageable to help with debugging if there are any problems.

During the multi-day PCL, we'd like to run a small number of deployments through to Production to ease the current commit pressure and avoid a large number of commits accumulating into a single deployment immediately following the PCL. A single post-deployment migration run will do the same for migrations while also keeping rollback options available.

Planned deployments:

  1. ✅ 2023-04-05 - 1 deployment through to Production
  2. ✅ 2023-04-06 - 1 deployment through to Production plus a post-deploy migration execution
  3. ✅ 2023-04-07 - 1 deployment through to Production
  4. ✅ 2023-04-10 - 1 deployment through to Production

Change Details

  1. Services Impacted - ServiceGitLab Rails ServiceGitaly
  2. Change Technician - @mayra-cabrera, @vglafirov
  3. Change Reviewer - @marin
  4. Time tracking - ~2hr per deployment
  5. Downtime Component - None expected

Detailed steps for the change

Change Steps - steps to take to execute the change

2023-04-05

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 250

2023-04-06 - Deployment to gprd

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 250

2023-04-06 - PDM

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 250

2023-04-07

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 250

2023-04-10

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - 250

Rollback

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

Estimated Time to Complete (mins) - Estimated Time to Complete in Minutes

Monitoring

Key metrics to observe

  • Metric: Metric Name
    • Location: Dashboard URL
    • What changes to this metric should prompt a rollback: Describe Changes

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 labels blocks deployments and/or blocks feature-flags are applied as necessary

Change Technician checklist

  • Check if all items below are complete:
    • The change plan is technically accurate.
    • 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.
    • For C1 and C2 change issues, the change event is added to the GitLab Production calendar.
    • For C1 and C2 change issues, the SRE on-call has been informed prior to change being rolled out. (In #production channel, mention @sre-oncall and this issue and await their acknowledgement.)
    • For C1 and C2 change issues, the SRE on-call provided approval with the eoc_approved label on the issue.
    • For C1 and C2 change issues, the Infrastructure Manager provided approval with the manager_approved label on the issue.
    • Release managers have been informed (If needed! Cases include DB change) 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.
Edited by Mayra Cabrera