Publishing to and listing components in the GitLab.com CI/CD Catalog

Problem Statement

The CI/CD Catalog lists components that have been published from projects across the entire instance. On GitLab.com, that is the main purpose and appeal of the catalog – only listing projects that are within your own Cell / organization is antithetical to the goal of the catalog.

But from a technical perspective, with Cells that would be the only possible option in the Rails monolith. While we're exploring How to use components from different Cells (#456843 - closed), discovery of these components is also essential.

Proposal

In the Protocells Office Hours, a separate service outside of the monolith was suggested. This service would only be running on GitLab.com, not be shipped together with SM/Dedicated (which will remain to operate as a single Cell, so their catalogs won't have this problem to solve and can continue working as today).

On GitLab.com, this new service would be the target of where components are published to. The https://gitlab.com/explore/catalog page would retrieve the components to list from that service as well.

T-Shirt Size

XXL, there is still many unknowns. Also, the prospect of having to own a service (with uptime requirements and other SRE aspects that are not necessarily dealt with already as they are with the monolith) is unprecedented for grouppipeline authoring.