Add support for targeting a cell in Smoke test and End to end tests in Staging

Test Tooling Improvement Request

Summary

In order to know how much work / interlock is needed for cells, we need to know how much of the monolith E2E tests are currently working with Cells.

As mentioned here: gitlab-com/gl-infra/tenant-scale/cells-infrastructure/team#342 (comment 2547951197)

The desire is to add two pipeline schedules which can be run manually here: https://ops.gitlab.net/gitlab-org/quality/staging/-/pipeline_schedules One for QA smoke tests and one for E2E tests. The url would remain staging.gitlab.com but there would be a cookie _gitlab_session set to cell-2-somerandomstring which would ensure the tests would route to a cell rather than staging host.

I'm happy to manage/own the schedules if that's appropriate. Also there's likely no gitlab-qa user on the cell so I can make that user if needed.

Requester Information

  • Name: David Leach
  • Team: Cells Infrastructure
  • Role: Site Reliability Engineer
  • Slack Handle: David Leach

Request Details

  • Urgency: High
  • Requested Completion Date:
  • Is this blocking any release or milestone? No

Tool Information

Tool Name/Type:

Current Testing Challenges:

Right now we've got very little visibility into how functional the currently configured cells are

Expected Benefits:

An Allure report would help identify where gaps are and how much additional work is required to get cells to a point where they're fully functional

Alternatives Considered:

We've added basic testing to ensure routing works but re-implementing end to end tests for the app doesn't seem feasible. We also want to ensure we're testing the same things via the exact same mechanism rather than doing things like changing urls or configuring another project as it may introduce/make us blind to issues we'll likely face in the fully integrated scenario

Implementation Context

Integration Requirements:

User Base:

In the short term it would be manual runs performed by cells team members, in the long term it would likely become part of standard tests

Success Criteria:

  • Smoke tests are able to be run against cell 2 and are validated to be routed to cell 2
  • End to end tests are able to be run against cell 2 and are validated to be routed to cell 2

Resources

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  • Budget Considerations: