Environment.action: access and prepare should reset the auto_stop_in timer when set for the environment

Release notes

Previously, when using the action: prepare, action: verify, and action: access jobs together with the auto_stop_in setting, the timer was not reset. Starting in 18.0, action: prepare and action: access will reset the timer, while action: verify leaves it untouched.

For now, you can change to the new implementation now by enabling the prevent_blocking_non_deployment_jobs feature flag.

Multiple breaking changes are intended to differentiate the behavior of the environment.action: prepare | verify | access values. The environment.action: access keyword will remain the closest to its current behavior, except for the timer reset.

To prevent future compatibility issues, you should review your use of these keywords now. You can learn more about these proposed changes in the following issues:

• Issue 437132
• Issue 437133
• Issue 437142

Problem to solve

As a Development Team lead, I want to make sure that ephemeral environments don't stop prematurely when engineers are still trying to reach them.

The environment.action CI attribute has 5 valid values:

• start (default)
• stop
• prepare
• access
• verify

We learned that prepare/access/verify are identical in terms of behaviour. At the same time, there are various requests asking for different behaviour in different use cases. We want to provide the following setup:

require approval \ reset timer	❌ reset timer	✅ reset timer
❌ approval	verify	access
✅ approval	❓	prepare

Proposal

Reset the environment.auto_stop_in timer when a job with environment.action: prepare | access runs for the given environment.

Intended users

• Delaney (Development Team Lead)

Feature Usage Metrics

• MAU of environment.action jobs by value

Does this feature require an audit event?

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