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Compute Minute Management

Problem to solve

It is crucial for organisations to have a comprehensive understanding of their compute minute balance, consumption, and forecast. This allows for better resource allocation and cost optimization. Additionally, organisations should have a user-friendly interface to delve into the specifics of compute unit usage to ensure transparency. A seamless purchasing flow for new compute minutes is essential to ensure customers are not blocking pipelines.

The current user experience around buying and using Compute Minutes is intransparent and cumbersome.

Proposal

Compute Minute Overview:

Group Level: Organisations require an easy-to-use system that provides an overview of their compute minute balance, consumption, and forecast. This enables them to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and budget planning. By having a clear understanding of their compute minute usage, organisations can optimize their operations and avoid unnecessary expenses.

Repository Level: Developers require an easy-to-use system that provides insights into the consumption and quota usage of their compute minutes. This enables them to make informed decisions on how to design and setup pipelines.

Drilling Down into Compute Unit Usage:

To achieve full transparency, organisations need the capability to drill down into the details of compute unit usage per sub-group. This allows them to analyze how and when compute units are utilized, identifying any inefficiencies or potential areas for improvement. With this granular level of insight, organisations can optimize their compute minute usage.

Intuitive Compute Minute Purchasing:

In order to streamline operations, organisations should have an intuitive way to purchase new compute minutes. This eliminates the need for complex procurement processes and reduces administrative burden. By providing a user-friendly interface for compute minute purchasing, organisations can easily scale their resources to meet their evolving needs.

Compute Minute Quotas for Sub-Groups

Organisations might want to limit the spending of compute minutes for specific sub-groups or repositories to not have one group use up the whole organisations' balance. To achieve this we want to introduce a way for organisations to define a quota for max usage of compute minutes per month.

Optimise Compute Minute Spending

We want to guide users to spend their Compute Minutes in an optimal way to gain the most out of it. Therefore we could use Job data to see if a jobs VM is running on too low or high a load - suggesting changes to the user. This feature could be AI-powered.

Intended users

Personas are described at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/personas/

User experience goal

Covered use cases:

  • Compute minutes balance
  • Easy way to purchase compute minutes
  • Dashboard for compute minutes spent for the last x days.
  • Understand how and where exactly compute units are spent
  • Drilling down per group & usage type
  • Forecast on estimated compute unit spent (based on data)
  • Set quotas for sub-groups compute minute spending
  • Support in optimizing compute spending (Maybe AI-assisted)

Permissions and Security

The full version of the compute minute dashboard should be only visible to group owners. A leaner version could be exposed to the developer persona on a repository level to allow for full transparency of compute minute usage.

Documentation

Documentation on Compute Minutes

Available Tier

  • Premium/Silver
  • Ultimate/Gold

Feature Usage Metrics

MAU

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Is this a cross-stage feature?

If we decide to expand this compute minute management solution to other consumables such as Product Analytics or Code Suggestions, this would be cross-stage.

What is the competitive advantage or differentiation for this feature?

Links / references

Epics & Big boulders

  1. "CI minutes" > "compute minutes" (gitlab-com&2150 - closed)
  2. CI/CD Minutes Improvements: Make it easier to s... (&8378)
  3. CI Minutes Cost Factor follow-ups (&9039)
  4. Configure CI minute limits per project and sub-... (&6378)
  5. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics?state=opened&page=1&sort=start_date_desc&label_name[]=CI+minutes

Other Links

  1. CI minutes history: https://youtu.be/3B-atN-STKk
  2. CI minute Experience: https://youtu.be/hBpasxOc6CE
  3. CI Minute architecture overview: https://youtu.be/NmdWRGT8kZg

This page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features, or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.

Edited by Gabriel Engel