Use Case: Distributed Systems / Microservices

Description

From 12 Factor, if there are multiple codebases, it’s not an app – it’s a distributed system. We should support distributed systems, especially mindful of the rising trend in microservices and Docker adoption. We cover multi-project pipelines elsewhere, but we can go further with system-level views and coordinated deploys.

Shortcomings (partial)

1. Pipeline (and job?) list at the group level (so you can see all pipelines for related microservices)
   1. This implies having a CI/CD menu at the group level, and charts for analytics
   2. This implies browsing Docker images at group level as well.
2. Multiple pipelines per repo (so you can cleanly support a monorepo of microservices with different pipelines)

Proposal (partial)

1. New view of related apps in a distributed system

• Zoom out in the project pipeline
• Group in GitLab for team/issue/activity tracking (maybe using nested groups, but maybe allowing multiple inheritance)

2. Block deploys of one component if it depends on a version of another component that has not been deployed yet to the same environment e.g.:
   1. Annotate relationship between merge requests so that we know if one MR blocks another.
   2. Track deploys of MRs to each environment so we know, for example, when a given MR is in production.
   3. We can block merges of one MR until upstream changes are merged.
   4. We can block deploys of one MR until upstream changes are deployed (to the same environment).
   5. This can work across projects so individual services get deployed in the right order.
3. Coordinated deploy of all related apps to a new environment. e.g. autogenerate a "cloudformation" because we know how the projects relate to each other. This could, for example, be used by GitHost to spin up a new single-tenant instances of GitLab for a new customer.

Links / references

• https://codefresh.io/continuous-integration/codefresh-versus-gitlabci/

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