Planning for silent mode

This issue is to help plan the development of the silent mode feature.

The feature will be a cross stage feature requiring collaboration with a number of groups.

Customers

The first customer for this feature will be the GitLab Dedicated team. We have a number of other self-managed customers who have also shown a keen interest in this feature.

Timeline

We have an ambitious timeline to deliver this in early FY24Q2.

The feature

The high-level feature is described in the Epic below. We will have issues assigned to each team under the epic. Initial discovery work was performed by @mkozono together with a number of others across many groups. The discovery issue is also linked below.

• Epic : gitlab-org&9826
• Discovery: gitlab-org/gitlab#371816

Groups impacted

The priority column will be used to indicate how important it is to block each type of notifications. Priority 1 indicating must have for MVC.

Feature	Group	Scheduled milestone	Priority	Notes
Suppress outgoing emails	groupgeo	15.11	1	✅
Suppress Gitlab::HTTP outbound requests	groupgeo	16.1	1	✅
Block integrations traffic	groupimport and integrate	TBD	1	Depends on gitlab-org/gitlab#410048 (closed)
Suppress outbound Project, Group, and System webhooks	groupimport and integrate	TBD	1	✅ Depends on gitlab-org/gitlab#410048 (closed)
Block mirroring	groupsource code	TBD	2
Document limitations	groupgeo	TBD	2
Suppress outgoing external traffic from container registry webhooks	grouppackage registry	TBD	3	This may not be required at all if we can validate that Dedicated would only employ safe notifications between registry and GitLab rails. The changes needed are configuration orchestrated at a higher level
Suppress outbound Deprecated Kubernetes Connections	groupenvironments	TBD	3	According to comments on Discovery issue, Dedicated would likely not offer this feature and thus may require no action for Silent Mode operation
Suppress Snowplow traffic	groupgeo	TBD	4