Sandbox Cell usage
Purpose
Identify how we will use a Sandbox Cell in Ring 0
Background
This is spawned off of Draft: Deployments & Releases for Cells and Dedicated: Delivery PoV and the Deployment Blueprint MR.
They are currently looking at deploying using a ring deployment methodology. This would deploy to sets of Cells in sequence until all Cells are updated. Ring 0 would contain Canary and a Sandbox Cell.
This is copied from the Deployment Blueprint, so may change:
The Primary
cell is our current .com environment for now
From looking at our test pipelines, we run against:
- Production
- Canary
- Staging
- Staging-Canary
- CustomerDotCom Staging
- Staging-Ref
- Release
Open questions
- Will Staging fold into a Ring 0 deploy instead of being an independant environment?
- Would the Sandbox Cell replace one of the existing environments?
3. How would we want to use the Sandbox Cell?defining below - Are there changes we'ld need to implement in gitlab-qa to support?
Usage
We are looking at using the Sandbox Cell in a couple different ways:
- To provide confidence in deployments and features by running the E2E suite against it
- To provide confidence in the Deploy process by providing a Shift Left opportunity to deploy to a non production environment
- To provide confidence in the Cells infrastructure sizing by running performance tests against it
We will run a series of E2E pipelines against the Sandbox Cell (wither we will run Full / Smoke / Reliable suites seperately like we do for other pipelines will be determined by need).
Dependancies
-
Ability to deploy all the Cell components (Router, Cell Dedicated environment, ?CDot?) -
A pipeline setup to run the E2E tests -
A pipeline setup to run the performance tests -
External services setup to integrate with the QA Cell -
CDot -
Runner?
-