Align the user experience for Auto DevOps and CI/CD
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Problem
There is a missed opportunity to provide a holistic solution to a shared problem that both Auto DevOps and GitLab CI/CD is addressing.
Auto DevOps are default CI/CD templates that auto-discover the source code you have. They enable GitLab to automatically detect, build, test, deploy, and monitor your applications. Leveraging CI/CD best practices and tools, Auto DevOps aims to simplify the setup and execution of a mature and modern software development lifecycle. (from Auto DevOps Docs)
With the current, completely separate user experience Auto DevOps and GitLab CI/CD are two competing solutions to the same problem, within one product. They compete because of how they're implemented in the UI, completely separate from each other. Both want to offer automation, ease of use, and also satisfy enterprise users with powerful customization capabilities.
As a user if I want CI/CD for my project/ organization. Regardless of the type of user I am, the options that are available to me are not clear when I look at GitLab UI. I see all the different features but have no idea which one is the right choice for me, there's very little cues on how they work.
Instead, we could leverage both solutions to complement each other, by making adjustments to how we surface these features in the UI. There are many different ways to do that, here's just a general scenario.
🚀 Proposal
Explore ways to do that because by having Auto DevOps and GitLab CI work in synergy we can maximize the value to our users as they're figuring out the optimal way to implement CI/CD practices in their organization.
This discussion would be great to raise in the upcoming Ops section ThinkBig! @mvrachni already added some topics around Auto DevOps, and we can bring the outstanding problems to a sync discussion.
Next Step
Discussion in the upcoming ThinkBig! on December 10th.
Further details
Here are some related conversations and issues.
- Slack thread about Auto DevOps vs. CI experience
- UX scorecard evaluation that touches upon Auto DevOps and CI (which one do you choose when you're a novice user unfamiliar with CI and want to create your first pipeline? how do you learn about these two and which one you need?)
Auto DevOps is a packaged CI/CD template for K8S. It's aimed for users who have a containerized application and want to create a CI/CD pipeline.
It's part of the Verify:Pipeline Authoring 3 year vision to recommend pipelines based on the project type, and automate the process for enabling them as much as possible. We'll then end up with something like the current Auto DevOps feature, but for a wide range of application/ project types. It seems like there's a lot of overlap in that vision and gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!66048 (comment 444294383), for example.
As we're moving in that direction, we need to make sure that the UX flows for Auto DevOps and CI/CD align where it makes sense to align them. We need to have a unified experience for creating a CI/CD pipeline for any project, and based on the type of the project we can suggest the automated solutions that are best suited for that specific project.