[L&R] Generating licenses for team members

Context

In November 2020, a change was made to restrict access to license.gitlab.com for all teams except Fulfillment and Support, specifically folks in Support who require access for their daily tasks. This change resulted in non-Support teams relying on Support to generate licenses for them.

GitLab team members who need licenses for their dev environment create internal requests and ask Support to generate the license.

Support impact

• Support does not have appropriate label to track these currently, but there is a template
• No specific guidance on rules for license generation, but template asks the requestor for manager approval and a reason if the license has to be valid for more than 90 days.
• No easy way to see amount at a glance, but see example

Considerations and questions

1. It is appropriate for Support (specifically folks with an L&R focus) to action these requests? Consider that these licenses are not for customers or related to subscriptions, trials or purchasing
2. If not appropriate for Support, which team would be suitable? Support-ops has mentioned that these requests may be appropriate for their scope. FYI @jcolyer
3. What kind of validation, approvals and restrictions should an internal team member license have? (think of: number of seats, plan, number of licenses per team member, validity period of a license, reasons for use, manager approval, etc)
4. How will the implementation of cloud licensing affect the generation of internal team member licenses?

Resources

1. Access request for teams eligible to have access to license app
2. SOX compliance issue
3. Most recent SOX compliance issue
4. Biz ops analyse license access impact
5. Feedback issue for license app restrictions