GitLab 14.4 Release Kickoff, 16 Sep 2021

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From YouTube: GitLab 14.4 Kickoff - Release

Description

This video is the GitLab 14.4 Milestone Kickoff for the Release Group

Planning issue - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/release-group/release/-/issues/80

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Hello, my name is kevin chu, I'm the acting product manager for the release group at gitlab, and this is the release group's 14.4, milestone kickoff.

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In this milestone. We have four things across different issues that we are going to aim to deliver number one: we're gonna resolve all existing uh gitlab database, sharding issues that the release group is responsible for. Second, we're going to add some limitations to gitlab pages.

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Third, we're going to address all known priority, 2 and severity to security issues and bugs, and, lastly, we're going to be adding in some instrumentation.

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So we can understand better how our customers are using our products, let's dive into the details, so the release group is participating in a gitlab wide initiative to make our databases more performant, so some the work that we're taking on is removing cross joints, uh disallowing the possibility of having orphaned, ids and, lastly, removing cross db modification.

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What this is is modifying the database in two different tables within the same transaction, which can lead to some problems.

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The second thing I want to talk about is putting limitations on get live pages. Currently, today there is anybody. Can access gitlab pages and there is no limitation of any kind. This can become problematic when there is a huge spike in traffic, whether malicious or not.

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The the spiking traffic can lead to an outage for gilad pages. So we want to avoid this from happening in the future.

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So the first thing we're doing going to do is we're going to put in some limitation based on domain we're also going to in the future we're also going to be putting in limitations based on source id.

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We hope this in combination with a few other things that we will be doing to get lab pages or make gitlab pages fundamentally more resilient.

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Some of the bugs we're taking on includes a general usability improvement. Sometimes in certain cases your users are not able to download release evidence. Sometimes the release asset link is not generated when certain events occur. We're going to remove we're going to try to address all our all of the highest severity issues we currently have in our backlog in the sprint.

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uh When it comes to instrumentation, currently we count the release groups smell or stage monthly active users as users who have interacted with the pipeline that has an environment inside of it, because the environment is a proxy for a user. That's using gitlab release features, while this is a good starting point, it under counts.

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The total number of people actually using release features we're going to try to improve it by looking for people who have deployment jobs in their pipeline and we're going to take that new information aggregate that, together with users who are using environment, to better understand the total number of people who is actually using gelap to deploy and today, because a gitlab release in a gitlab deployment is not a single complete flow.

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We're also going to take an aggregate of both users of releases and users who are deploying with git lab together, as as a new stage, monthly active user that we look at regularly.

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uh Besides these things, uh we are also going to continue to work on environments.

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One of the first things that we're going to do is at the buttons on the environment pages currently provide very little context and on smaller pages, because of the way it's designed, I can can lead to situations where it's hard to use or hard to see we're going to fix that by introducing a new button design.

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Just a preview here, we're going to uh show the most pertinent buttons with appropriate context right from the get-go for capability. That's used less often they're going to be hidden behind this kebab menu.

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The other thing we hope to do in this milestone on the environment page is we're going to improve the default sorting on the environment page when you have or actually this is.

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This is a sorting of deployments right now. It's currently sorted by the most recent commits, but, however, you can be deploying a commit.

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That is a little bit dated in this case, despite it being deployed more recently, you will be further down the list, so we're going to change that to the most recent deployment as a default sorting option looking forward a bit uh we're going to continue to redesign the environment page to make it more user-friendly, currently uh oftentimes, it's really difficult to see.

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What's what on the environment page based on the table layout that the environment page currently has we're going to change that up, make it useful, no matter how big your screen size is other improvement that we have coming up that we're designing for currently is. In 14.3 we introduce the concept group level uh configuration for protected environments. This allows organizations to separate developers from operators, so developers cannot simply easily deploy to whatever environments within the single group.

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This is available starting 14 speed, but in 14 in the future, we're going to be adding a ui to make that even easier to use.

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That's all for the release group in 14 4 I'll link, the our planning issue in the description of this video and please reach out. If you have any questions comments, thank you.