Investigate what has to be true to enable S3 support for next-gen container registry migration (JiHu use case)

Context

GitLab JH is a specific distribution built on top of EE that is produced by the JiHu team. That distribution has a license with different tiers similar to EE and can be used in self-managed installs or the JiHu SaaS, which is https://jihulab.com/.

In metadata database feature not support s3 storag... (#751 - closed), it was brought to our attention the need to support S3 in JH SaaS (https://jihulab.com).

JH SaaS is deployed on Tencent Cloud, the container registry uses the cloud object storage (COS, S3 compatible) as its storage driver.

Topic to evaluate

What is the work necessary, and what has to be true to add support for S3 in JH SaaS

This is not an implementation task but an investigation to understand what needs to be done and to create a high-level implementation plan.

Some questions to get answered

• If JH SaaS is a specific distribution, should this be treated as self- managed?
• What are the pros and cons of accelerating work on self-managed and starting with JH's specific distribution?

Tasks to Evaluate

• Determine the feasibility of the feature
• Create issue for implementation or update existing implementation issue description with implementation proposal
• Set weight on implementation issue
• If weight is greater than 5, break issue into smaller issues