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Improve onboarding/adoption for "Idea to Production" flow

Work on onboarding and adoption is needed to actually deliver on the vision of people using GitLab for getting their ideas into production. The demo is great, but we have a long way to go to make it easy for everyone to use. This should be fleshed out and planned for immediately.

There's a grab-bag of ideas already. The trick is to figure out which minimal set of these (or new ideas) will make the most difference and result in a clean flow from beginning to end.

Auto Deploy has been a great experiment, but feels like it's hitting the end of its runway in value, until we improve things elsewhere. In particular, we can make it easier to create and manage kubernetes clusters, or better yet, provide some amount of compute for free to make it really easy to get started.

We can improve Auto Deploy, now in Auto DevOps.

But while Auto Deploy makes a great demo, it's opaque, not configurable, and doesn't teach people how to grow their CI/CD usage over time. We can make using CI/CD Pipelines easier. Make it easier to create .gitlab-ci.yml, or make it unnecessary to create one at all.

We could also make it easy to make the other components of a good CI/CD pipeline such as:

  • Creation of Docker containers
    • Since we are starting from (I think) an assumption we are running on a cloud provider here, could we help people create Dockerfiles? If we do this, CI may still be manual but CD could get really easy? (Note, we now have Dockerfile templates)
  • Creation of Helm chart

For ChatOps onboarding, we need:

Application Performance Monitoring onboarding (Prometheus):

Links

Edited by Jason Yavorsky