[Feature flag] Enable debian group packages

Summary

This issue is to rollout the feature on production, that is currently behind the debian_group_packages feature flag.

Owners

• Team: Package
• Most appropriate slack channel to reach out to: #s_package
• Best individual to reach out to: @sabrams, @10io
• PM: @trizzi

Stakeholders

The Rollout Plan

• Partial Rollout on GitLab.com with testing groups
• Rollout on GitLab.com for a certain period (How long)
• Percentage Rollout on GitLab.com
• Rollout Feature for everyone as soon as it's ready

Testing Groups/Projects/Users

• gitlab-org/gitlab project
• gitlab-org/gitlab-com groups
• ...

Expectations

What are we expecting to happen?

Group level debian packages and distributions are made available.

What might happen if this goes wrong?

The new features do not work, or have some unintended side effect on the project-level endpoints

What can we monitor to detect problems with this?

https://dashboards.gitlab.net/d/stage-groups-package/stage-groups-group-dashboard-package-package?orgId=1

Rollout Steps

Rollout on non-production environments

• Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to non-production environments.
  • /chatops run auto_deploy status <merge-commit-of-your-feature>
• Enable the feature globally on non-production environments.
  • /chatops run feature set debian_group_packages true --dev
  • /chatops run feature set debian_group_packages true --staging
• Verify that the feature works as expected. Posting the QA result in this issue is preferable.

Preparation before production rollout

• Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to both production and canary.
  • /chatops run auto_deploy status <merge-commit-of-your-feature>
• Check if the feature flag change needs to be accompanied with a change management issue. Cross link the issue here if it does.
• Ensure that you or a representative in development can be available for at least 2 hours after feature flag updates in production. If a different developer will be covering, or an exception is needed, please inform the oncall SRE by using the @sre-oncall Slack alias.
• Ensure that documentation has been updated (More info).
• Announce on the feature issue an estimated time this will be enabled on GitLab.com.
• If the feature might impact the user experience, notify #support_gitlab-com and your team channel (more guidance when this is necessary in the dev docs).
• If the feature flag in code has an actor, enable it on GitLab.com for testing groups/projects.
  • /chatops run feature set --<actor-type>=<actor> debian_group_packages true
• Verify that the feature works as expected. Posting the QA result in this issue is preferable.

Global rollout on production

• Incrementally roll out the feature.
  • If the feature flag in code has an actor, perform actor-based rollout.
    • /chatops run feature set debian_group_packages <rollout-percentage> --actors
  • If the feature flag in code does NOT have an actor, perform time-based rollout (random rollout).
    • /chatops run feature set debian_group_packages <rollout-percentage>
  • Enable the feature globally on production environment.
    • /chatops run feature set debian_group_packages true
• Announce on the feature issue that the feature has been globally enabled.
• Wait for at least one day for the verification term.

Release the feature

After the feature has been deemed stable, the clean up should be done as soon as possible to permanently enable the feature and reduce complexity in the codebase.

• Create a merge request to remove debian_group_packages feature flag. Ask for review and merge it.
  • Remove all references to the feature flag from the codebase.
  • Remove the YAML definitions for the feature from the repository.
  • Create a changelog entry.
• Ensure that the cleanup MR has been deployed to both production and canary. If the merge request was deployed before the code cutoff, the feature can be officially announced in a release blog post.
  • /chatops run auto_deploy status <merge-commit-of-cleanup-mr>
• Close the feature issue to indicate the feature will be released in the current milestone.
• Clean up the feature flag from all environments by running these chatops command in #production channel:
  • /chatops run feature delete debian_group_packages --dev
  • /chatops run feature delete debian_group_packages --staging
  • /chatops run feature delete debian_group_packages
• Close this rollout issue.

Rollback Steps

• This feature can be disabled by running the following Chatops command:

/chatops run feature set debian_group_packages false