Phase 6 current state of things
Current State
Looking at pahses definition we have the following definition of Phase 6:
-
Phase 6: Cell 2 Ready (QA cell, no external customers)
- Phase 6a: Application Readiness
- Basic functionality across Cells such as sign-up, project creation, running pipelines.
- Enable organizations FF on Cell 2
- Hook up Fulfillment/License
- Phase 6b: Continuous Deployment to Cell 2 (QA cell, no external customers)
- Dedicated on GCP pre-GA
- Able to run QA E2E tests across cells
- Hook up data replication to Snowplow/Tableau
- Limitations
- No automation
- No internal and external customers
- Phase 6a: Application Readiness
Problems of Phase 6
Primary focusing on QA Cell part. This is a very large chunk of work spanning 2 quarters (FY25-Q2 FY25-Q3) to get the most feature parity (registry, advanced search, CI). At the moment we have 5 SREs (including me, and 2 ramping up) working on this.
We also found that that the QA Cell became a blocker for certain things:
- Support runway deployment in external GCP proje... (gitlab-com/gl-infra/platform/runway/team#243 - closed) Needed a new GCP organization
- Topology Service Staging/Production deployment: Needed the new GCP organization
- Delivery team from testing GCP deploys
- A feedback system for application developers to test if routes/topology service will actually work with 2+ Cells
Now this seems like very long and high-priority work, and gives something to the rest of the engineering department to see when it's done.
This is why I think Phase 6
might be contending with resources from Phase 1, 2 we don't have SREs working on the passthrough rollout at the moment because most of them are either working on QA Cell or on Topology Service deployment.