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Created by Shinya Maeda@shinya.maeda💡Maintainer30 of 40 tasks completed30/40 tasks

[Feature flag] Rollout of `ci_resource_group_process_modes`

Summary

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

Owners

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

Expectations

What are we expecting to happen?

Users should be able to choose the Process Mode in Resource Groups. The new modes are opt-in, so enabling flags doesn't immediately take an effect.

What might happen if this goes wrong?

The databae queries executed in the new modes are relatively intensive. Hence we have already optimized the query in the other issue, however, we should be careful on the query performance.

What can we monitor to detect problems with this?

Since this is opt-in feature, an issue would be reported in the GitLab Issue Tracker.

Rollout Steps

Rollout on non-production environments

  • Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to non-production environments.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status 95c33c0279e54e344350141e17a9c844702d2d57
  • Enable the feature globally on non-production environments.
    • /chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes true --dev
    • /chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes 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 95c33c0279e54e344350141e17a9c844702d2d57
  • 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).

Global rollout on production

All /chatops commands that target production should be done in the #production slack channel for visibility.

  • Confirm the feature flag is enabled on staging without incident

  • Roll out the feature to targeted testing projects/groups first

    • /chatops run feature set --project=shinya.maeda/resource-group-modes-test ci_resource_group_process_modes true
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-org/gitlab ci_resource_group_process_modes true
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-org/gitlab-foss ci_resource_group_process_modes true
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com ci_resource_group_process_modes true

  • Incrementally roll out the feature.

    • If the feature flag in code has an actor, perform actor-based rollout.
      • /chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes 50 --actors
      • /chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes 75 --actors
    • If the feature flag in code does NOT have an actor, perform time-based rollout (random rollout).
      • /chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes <rollout-percentage>

  • Verify the change has the desired outcome with the limited rollout before enabling the feature globally on production.

  • Enable the feature globally on production environment. /chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes 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 ci_resource_group_process_modes 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 ci_resource_group_process_modes --dev
    • /chatops run feature delete ci_resource_group_process_modes --staging
    • /chatops run feature delete ci_resource_group_process_modes
  • Close this rollout issue.

Rollback Steps

  • This feature can be disabled by running the following Chatops command:
/chatops run feature set ci_resource_group_process_modes false
Edited by Shinya Maeda