[Feature flag] Rollout of `disallow_private_profiles`

Summary

This issue is to rollout Disable users from changing user profile to private on production, that is currently behind the disallow_private_profiles feature flag.

Owners

  • Most appropriate Slack channel to reach out to: #g_organizations
  • Best individual to reach out to: @smaglangit
  • PM: @lohrc

Stakeholders

Expectations

What are we expecting to happen?

Admin should have a new instance-wide setting to prevent users for setting their profile as private.

When is the feature viable?

  1. Navigate to Admin > Settings > General
  2. Toggle "Allow users to make their profile private" setting

What might happen if this goes wrong?

  1. Service degradation around endpoints related to user profile or admin settings.
  2. Inconsistent profile visibility (i.e. private profiles can be viewed publicly and vice versa)

What can we monitor to detect problems with this?

Consider mentioning checks for 5xx errors or other anomalies like an increase in redirects (302 HTTP response status)

  1. Watch out for Web Traffic or API service degradation Gitlab Public Dashboards (Internal)
  2. Look for any errors that might be related to the profile's visibility Kibana (Internal)
    • This feature has a low likelihood of failing. There's no specific error that we're expecting.
  3. Look for user-profile related alerts on Sentry (Internal)

What can we check for monitoring production after rollouts?

  1. Monitor the error rates and logs on the linked dashboards.
  2. Watch for user reports about inconsistent profile visibility (i.e. private profiles can be viewed publicly and vice versa)

Rollout Steps

Note: Please make sure to run the chatops commands in the Slack channel that gets impacted by the command.

Rollout on non-production environments

  • Verify the MR with the feature flag is merged to master and have been deployed to non-production environments with /chatops run auto_deploy status <merge-commit-of-your-feature>
  • Enable the feature globally on non-production environments with /chatops run feature set <feature-flag-name> true --dev --staging --staging-ref
  • Verify that the feature works as expected. The best environment to validate the feature in is staging-canary as this is the first environment deployed to. Make sure you are configured to use canary.
    • Opting not to as this is an instance-level setting that requires admin access.
  • If the feature flag causes end-to-end tests to fail, disable the feature flag on staging to avoid blocking deployments.

For assistance with end-to-end test failures, please reach out via the #quality Slack channel. Note that end-to-end test failures on staging-ref don't block deployments.

Specific rollout on production

For visibility, all /chatops commands that target production should be executed in the #production Slack channel and cross-posted (with the command results) to the responsible team's Slack channel (#g_TEAM_NAME).

  • Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to both production and canary with /chatops run auto_deploy status <merge-commit-of-your-feature>

Preparation before global rollout

  • Set a milestone to this rollout issue to signal for enabling and removing the feature flag when it is stable.
  • 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.
  • Leave a comment on the feature issue announcing estimated time when this feature flag will be enabled on GitLab.com.
  • Ensure that any breaking changes have been announced following the release post process to ensure GitLab customers are aware.
  • Notify the #support_gitlab-com Slack channel and your team channel (more guidance when this is necessary in the dev docs).
  • Ensure that the feature flag rollout plan is reviewed by another developer familiar with the domain.

Global rollout on production

For visibility, all /chatops commands that target production should be executed in the #production Slack channel and cross-posted (with the command results) to the responsible team's Slack channel (#g_organizations).

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.

You can either create a follow-up issue for Feature Flag Cleanup or use the checklist below in this same issue.

  • Create a merge request to remove the <feature-flag-name> feature flag. Ask for review/approval/merge as usual. The MR should include the following changes:
    • 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 included in the release package. If the merge request was deployed before the monthly release was tagged, the feature can be officially announced in a release blog post: /chatops run release check <merge-request-url> <milestone>
  • 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 <feature-flag-name> --dev --staging --staging-ref --production
  • Close this rollout issue.

Rollback Steps

  • This feature can be disabled by running the following Chatops command:
/chatops run feature set disallow_private_profiles false
Edited by Shane Maglangit