SKA Organisation migration to GitLab

Background

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a next-generation radio astronomy facility that will revolutionise our understanding of the Universe and the laws of fundamental physics. It will have a uniquely distributed character: one observatory, operating two telescopes, on three continents for the global scientific community. The SKA’s operational phase is expected to last at least 50 years.

The recently completed SKA Global Headquarters is located at Jodrell Bank near Manchester in the UK, home to the organisation -the future SKA Observatory- that oversees development, construction and operations. The two other SKA sites are radio quiet zones and home to the telescopes themselves: a mid-frequency array in South Africa (SKA-mid), and a low-frequency array in Australia (SKA-low). In order to take advantage of the development of computing and other innovative technologies of relevance for the SKA programme, the construction of the SKA will be phased. Work is currently focused on the first phase named SKA1.

SKA1 will be a transformational scientific facility. It will tackle some of the most fundamental scientific questions of our time, ranging from the birth of the Universe to the origins of life.

Goals

Quick Facts

  • Timeline. - The construction of the SKA1 telescopes will start in the second quarter of 2021. By this time, our development activity wil be based mostly on Gitlab as a DVCS and CI server.
  • Product. - GitLab Gold/Ultimate
  • Project's License. SKA will always approve repositories licensed under the terms of a BSD 3-clause license as described at: https://developer.skatelescope.org/en/latest/projects/licensing.html

Current Tooling and Replacements

Tool Feature GitLab feature GitLab edition

Collaborators

The SKA software community is a large collaboration, here listed you will find the main contact point interacting on the Gitlab adoption from the SKA Organisation .

SKA

GitLab

Related Issues

A number of issues is related to the desired flexibility on the hosted plan. At the moment it is clear that for an organisation that manages multiple projects, the enterprise version of Gitlab is the goto product. Our organisation has no interest in a self-hosted solution at the moment, we are working with developers from across the globe and we do not have resources and infrastructure to provide the same availability and performance as provided by Gitlab.com . As result we are using Gitlab groups and subgroups to manage a number of projects and teams and we can see how these can be improved in this direction to meet the needs of clients in our same situation.

Blockers

Urgent

Important but not urgent

Nice to have

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/cc @nuritzi

Edited by Bryan Behrenshausen