Discussion: Package Team to own the Terraform Registry

Context

In 14.10, GitLab launched the MVC of the Terraform Registry. This feature empowered users to publish, share and download Terraform modules. To date, this has been owned by the Configure group.

Problem to solve

The problem is that although the Configure group added support for this format, as the feature matures and customer adoption increases, it's clear that there are many feature and support requests that apply more generally to the Package Registry.

For example, adding a group-level endpoint, package usage data, and an improved user interface. As a PM when speaking with customers it seems like distinguishing between the Terraform Registry and the rest of the Package Registry is an artificial line between groups that don't make sense. And as a customer, it means you have to talk to two different PMs to hear about roadmaps and prioritization.

Proposal

The Package group should take ownership of the Terraform registry and prioritize any future issues along with the rest of its product roadmap. This would allow us to think about the product more holistically and give our customers a single entry point into all discussions about the Package Registry.

Risks of action

1. The Package group is already well beyond our capacity to take on additional work and we would not be able to prioritize any Terraform-specific issues until we grow the team and those new team members are onboarded.
2. The Package group is not familiar with Terraform and it would require the team to learn about the implementation and use cases.

Risks of inaction

1. The Configure group is already well beyond our capacity and does not have any work planned for the foreseeable future around the Terraform registry, given other priorities.
2. The Terraform registry misses the improvements that land in other registries because of not having a shared codebase
3. The registry confuses our users as they'd expect a single PM to own the registries

Top related issues

• Group-level Terraform registry
• Show module usage instructions on the Module page
• Insights into module usage
• Terraform prodiver registry

Given the proposal and the risks, I wanted to open up this discussion to the Package and Configure teams to see if this makes sense and field any questions/comments/concerns before moving forward.