Do users need to prioritize a list of remotes for where to pull packages from?
Problem Statement
Most organizations pull (and push) packages to several different remote repositories. It's difficult for them to use GitLab's offering because it limits them to one local repository and forces developers to use the GitLab URL structure in scoping and naming all of their packages.
Artifactory and Nexus allow you to define an ordered list of these remote repositories in which to look for a given package and they each will cache previously fetched packages for faster, more reliable access in the future. These remote repositories then sit behind a virtual view called e.g. central. As an example, you can setup a virtual remote repository which Maven only asks once for https://artifactory.ourcompany.com/artifactory/central/
. If it finds the GAV in local-releases, it will deliver it from there and otherwise walk through the remaining locals and caches
By providing you with a view of several local and remote repositories, they greatly simplify the life of the Admin, who no longer has to worry about development teams not correctly resolving their dependencies. For Developers, they don't want to think about which remote they should pull a package from, they want to use a single endpoint and have the logic work seamlessly behind the scenes.
Reach
1.5 A small portion (5% - 25%) of the overall GitLab customer base encounter this problem but we believe this is an opportunity to attract customers of Artifactory and Nexus who want to consolidate on GitLab for all of their package management needs.
Roles
- Delaney (Development Team Lead)
- Sasha (Software Developer)
- Devon (DevOps Engineer)
- Sidney (Systems Administrator)
Impact
2.0 This is a key feature to influence users looking to migrate from Artifactory. Solving this problem will help more of our customers consolidate on GitLab, saving money and becoming more efficient.
During user interviews, this has been brought up as the most valuable feature Artifactory offers, and one that Sidney (Systems Administrator) can't live without.
Confidence
100% = High confidence We have High Confidence (100%) that this is a problem because it is currently offered and a popular feature in both Artifactory and Nexus. In addition, we have talked with several customers who ave asked for this functionality/talked about the problem.
- Admin discussing why they can't rely on GitLab's Package Registry
- Admin discussing remote and virtual repositories
- Admin an enterprise customer explaining why it's hard for their team to adopt the Maven Repository 24:00
- Issue describing the challenge of adopting the NPM Registry due to the custom scopes we require
Effort
6 We believe that this will take a Product Designer and PM 1 month to validate (2) and then 2 engineers 2 months (4) to build an MVC for a total effort of 6 to deliver an MVC towards solving the problem.