Clarifying the GitLab Serverless vision
From some conversations I've had, something the Serverless team should try to figure out over the next quarter is a strong vision for what we want people to use this product for. There are some possible directions (that I can think of now) we could take this in that could be valuable if we focused and made the vision clear but so far all we've really built is an integration that offers a UI to Knative which has an unclear value add. Some possible options we have:
- Something like GitHub actions where we make it easier for customers to drive their own custom automation from events that happen within GitLab (ie. infinite programmable GitLab perhaps with frameworks that help with common workloads. It kinda competes with our CI product but would be wider reaching than just triggered by push events)
- Connecting GitLab's existing feature set to allow people to deploy microservices and functions alongside each other and configure their interactions through GitLab itself or at least make this easier. This relates to a customer need I've heard a few times to help them with their microservices journey and make this adoption of microservices easier for them. This is all connected to Auto DevOps and CI in general since GitLab should allow you to deploy any kind of application and we expect enterprises to have all kinds of applications and they should be able to use a centralised tool for configuring how they interact with each other as well as visualise their overall architecture.
- Focusing on monitoring mostly. Since there are many companies investing in Knative runtime and UX for deployment we could focus on visibility into your Knative workloads so that you never need to leave GitLab. This is something we're kinda working on already but it's unclear if this is a specific vision or just a single feature we think may be useful.
- Focusing on making "DevOps" more approachable to users of Serverless. From our research ux-research#99 (closed) we learnt that a significant percentage of people using Serverless technologies aren't even doing CI/CD and I think that this is partly because it is not approachable. GitLab is well positioned here to help out with the things people are having trouble with. For example figuring out why people think CI/CD is difficult and then making it easier. A little like Auto DevOps for Serverless specifically.
Edited by Dylan Griffith