Geo 16.7 outlook
This is the current outlook for the 16.7 milestone. The Geo team schedules issues and works in a continuous Kanban manner, while still aligning with milestones. See our process page for more detail.
Last Updated: 15th November 2023
priority1
Backup enhancementsWho: Gabriel and Mike
We are working on a new backup solution which we are calling `gitlab-unified-backup`. It will be a tool that works across all the different types of GitLab installations - Linux packaged, Docker, Cloud Native Hybrid and GDK. We are starting with building a single CLI that will work across all of these installation types whilst still relying on the existing code base for the heavy lifting. Over time we will enhance/replace existing code with solutions that will scale better and lead to more consistent backups. The long term vision can be seen in this epic. In this milestone we continue to work on building the unified CLI.
We already support awscli in the backup-utlity
for Cloud Native Hybrid as the S3 tool for downloading and uploading file from AWS S3. However, it is currently not documented. In this milestone, we will document this option. Awscli is more reliable and performant S3 tool than the default s3cmd tool.
GA runner acceleration priority1
Who: Ian, Aakriti, Douglas
Allowing runners to clone and retrieve data from secondary Geo sites will allow customers to reduce the demand on the primary site.
A number of customers have shown interest in accelerating CI runners using secondary sites. In a previous milestone, we tested the ability for runners to clone from secondary sites and identified a number of issues.
- Spike: GA runner acceleration - Complete
- LFS repos cannot be cloned when replication is not up-to-date - Complete
- Cloning LFS objects from secondary site downloads from the primary site even when secondary is fully synced - Complete
- Proxy pipeline ref request to primary if it has not been replicated to the secondary - In progress
- Cloning from secondary site can bring out of date repo - In progress
- LFS pull unexpectedly asks for credentials
Verify Upgrade procedure for PostgreSQL 14 on Geo installations priority2
Who: Nick and Ian
GitLab will start making Postgres 14 the default for all new installations. As part of this effort the Geo team needs to make sure Geo installations can upgrade for Postgres 14 from version 13 without issues. Our testing has highlighted a problem with upgrading the secondary database which we will investigate and address in this milestone.
Gather monthly unique secondary site users for git operations priority3
Who: Aakriti
We already have a metric for monthly unique secondary users that access the web UI via a secondary site. However, this metric does not account for users who perform git operations such as clone, pull, and push against a secondary site. Knowing this metric will give us a quantitative insight into how much the secondary sites are being utilised by remote teams to accelerate git operations. Visibility into this area will inform further investment accelerating remote teams.
Documentation improvements priority3
Who: Geo team
+ Axil
Geo documentation is in need of some cleanup and updating. There are several specific areas we want to add/update instructions for multi-node scenarios. We will be tackling these updates as a team in this milestone.