Tracking Issue for Remote Development Integration Branches

Overview

This issues tracks the integration branches for our architectural spikes to inform our work on the Remote Development Workspaces feature.

The primary goal of it is to provide the information links to the branch's MRs below, and to serve as a placeholder to ensure that all code and TODOs are eventually moved out of the integration branches into master or captured in issues.

It does not represent deliverable work itself, it is only intended to provide connection and visibility between the various repos' integration branch MRs and the parent epic Remote Development • Viable Maturity (&9190). This is necessary because MRs cannot be directly associated with epics.

The spike work consists of the integration branches represented across multiple repos by the following integration branch MRs:

• gitlab project (rails monolith):
  • Branch: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/remote_dev
  • MR: Remote Development feature behind a feature flag (!105783 - merged)
  • Closed, everything merged!
• gitlab-agent project (golang/protobuf portions of [GitLab Agent for Kubernetes](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/agent/)):
  • Branch: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit/-/tree/remote_dev
  • MR: gitlab-agent integration branch for "Remote Dev... (gitlab-org/cluster-integration/gitlab-agent!805 - closed)
  • Closed, everything merged! 🚀 🎉
• gitlab-development-kit project:
  • Branch: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit/-/tree/remote_dev
  • MR: Draft: GDK integration branch for "Remote Devel... (gitlab-development-kit!2863 - closed)
  • Closed, see GDK: tooling/config to support GA4K remote dev ... (#408164) for followup.

Testing/demos will be done in development, gitlab MR review apps, and/or local or manually deployed GA4K installations built from the gitlab-agent MR.

This issue shouldn't get closed until all those MRs are closed, which will be when everything on all those branches is either merged to master and rebased away, and we are left with just TODOs represented in follow-up issues.

References

• Remote Development Beta - Review and merge rail... (&10258 - closed) (this issue's parent epic)
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/remote-development/gitlab-remote-development-docs/-/blob/main/doc/integration-branch-process.md
  • Document how to split up remote_dev branch into... (#404552 - closed) (this issue will be superseded by the above doc)
  • The above plan has been superseded by the plan to merge the rails integration branch directly to master. See Remote Development Beta - Review and merge rail... (&10258 - closed) for more details.

Goals

Collectively, these integration branches are intended to prove out the relevant components of the proposed Remote Development architecture.

It will start with a minimal placeholder UI to exercise it, but as we near the MVC, we will also develop and integrate the "real" UI to replace the placeholder UI.

Non-goals

UPDATE: These plans have been superseded by the plan to merge the rails integration branch directly to master. See Remote Development Beta - Review and merge rail... (&10258 - closed) for more details

1. There is no plan to merge the MRs to master, and there will be no feature flagging.
2. There will be no error handling.
3. It will not have full test coverage, only that necessary to help TDD the spike or achieve full coverage so the undercoverage jobs do not fail on CI.
4. There will be minimal UI to exercise the functionality. The actual final UI may differ from what is implemented in the spikes.
5. There may not be automatic or UI-initiated cleanup of k8s infrastructure. Created k8s resources may need to be manually cleaned up.