Is the user experience of the Geo primary WebUI acceptable?
What’s this issue all about?
Gitlab Geo is used to create GitLab nodes in several Geo locations either to increase the speed of Git operations and/or for disaster recovery purposes.
Currently, only the primary
Geo node is read/write. All secondary instances are read only. Both node types can be accessed by users using two separate URLs e.g https://us.example.com
(primary) and https://eu.example.com
. (secondary).
The WebUI under https://eu.example.com will be read-only, which is indicated by a banner:
Any attempt to create a write operation (e.g. new project/issue), will raise an error:
In order to perform these actions, the user needs to click a link to get redirected to the primary
.
In this situation, a user needs to understand the differences between a secondary
and a primary
installation, the web experience is suboptimal and different URLs need to be used. Technical solutions to make the secondary
writable are challenging, and even proxying requests is potentially difficult. Before finding a technical solution, we want to investigate if the primary
's WebUI is sufficiently performant, which would mean we could retire the secondary
UIs other than for administrative purposes and disaster recovery.
More detailed information can be found in &1466 (closed)
What questions are you trying to answer?
The central hypothesis is the following: The WebUI performance of the primary is acceptable to users independent of their location.
We are interested in understanding if this is the case.
Additionally, we would like to answer the following question:
- Do users use the
secondary
web interface, or do they usually use theprimary
WebUI? - How do users manage
primary
andsecondary
URLs?
What assumptions do you have?
- We assume that Geo users do use the secondary and primary web interfaces.
- We assume that the URLs for secondary web interfaces are communicated to users
- We assume that users require read and write access to the GitLab WebUI.
What decisions will you make based on the research findings?
If it turns out that users are happy/find it acceptable to use the primary
web UI, or if they prefer this solution over the current state, we can direct all regular users to the primary URL e.g. https://gitlab.example.com
and use the secondary
UI only for admin tasks/DR.