Move all responsibilities of cluster applications into the project template
Empower our users to own the code that manages their infrastructure.
Release notes
Managing an infrastructure repository is one of the central responsibilities of an infrastructure team. GitLab supports this approach using GitLab Managed Applications (deprecated) and the Cluster Management Project. The Cluster Management Project until now worked as a CI template that could be included in any repository, and some magic happened in the Runner without allowing much control and restricting customizations. The CI template based approach struggled updating the image versions deployed into the cluster, it did not allow our users to add other applications to the stack and manage them from the same repository, and it hid some of the logic and settings from our users.
With the current GitLab release, we are moving away from a CI template based approach to a project template. In the future, Cluster Management Projects can easily be created from the provided GitLab project template. This project contains all the code run by the cluster management job. Users can easily extend the project by other applications and from now on, users own these projects, as a result they are not tied to GitLab releases to upgrade an application.
The cluster management project is today aimed at GitLab's certificate-based cluster integration, and is expected to work with the GitLab Kubernetes Agent in a future iteration.
Scope
remove in %14.0 the cluster application CI template- deprecate in %14.0 the cluster application CI template with a message pointing users to use the new project template instead.
- remove in %15.0 the cluster application CI template
- move all the helm templates into the cluster application project template
- Consolidate CI/CD based GitLab-managed apps
- Consider deprecating, and removing these apps that is less commonly installed
- Clusters::Applications::Crossplane
- Clusters::Applications::Jupyter
- Clusters::Applications::Knative
- Clusters::Applications::PostHog