How to market Geo DR
Description
Disaster Recovery is based on Geo, but at the moment, as it's not automated in Omnibus yet, it has to be setup independently. To be clear, currently, you can have Geo without having DR (but not the other way around). This made me think of the following.
I used to think that, once DR ships in beta, we should merge Geo and DR, and give a new name to the result, like Geo DR. At first I thought this was the way to go, but are we missing an opportunity here? Before we make the change in 9.1 or 9.2, I'd like your thoughts on it.
Questions
Conceptually, Geo and DR are two different concepts: one allows to work more efficiently as a distributed company, the other lets you add resiliency to your infrastructure. But it happens that we use the technology of the former to accomplish the latter.
While it's simpler to have a unique product engineering-wise, we should still consider the following aspects, which could influence the development moving forward:
- Sales: Geo and DR are both EEP. DR is one of these major features that sales might want to be able to toggle off when negotiating a price. Offering the flexibility to toggle either DR or Geo might be interesting.
- Marketing: Should Geo and DR be two separate features, marketing-wise? Will it be easier to market? Or would it be easier to market DR and Geo as a single feature?
We have an answer:
- GitLab Geo => Geo Replication
- Geo DR => Disaster Recovery