Draft plan for SM and SaaS architecture supporting Organizations
Background
The grouptenant scale group is working on restructuring how customers manage their hierarchy of instances, groups and users in gitlab-org&9265. We will need to adapt how we issues licenses to fit with the new organizational structure, so some work will be needed in conjunction with that project, however given the sweeping changes and required work anyway this may be a good opportunity to rethink how we how we handle license issuance.
There has also recently been interest in reducing the divergence between SaaS and SM code paths, gitlab-org/gitlab#418111 (closed). That effort was set aside in light of the work being done with Organizations changing the landscape dramatically. The goal of keeping a single code path for each type of entity regardless of where the tenant resides is a good goal that should guide our planning here.
Proposal
This issue aims to address understanding:
- how organizations will operate as units of licensing
- what the touch points within the Gitlab and Customers Dot applications that will be impacted by these changes
- who the stakeholders and SMEs for those touch points
Once the elements of the problem are identified this issue will serve as a jumping off point to propose how licensing should operate in this new environment, and get feedback from stakeholders on that plan.