GitLab GitLab Group Kickoffs - Create:Ecosystem, 17 Mar 2021

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From YouTube: GitLab 13.11 Kickoff -- Create:Ecosystem

Description

Service Template deprecation update: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/325196

Rename "Services" to "Integrations": https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2504

Expand Atlassian Connect App to function as a proxy for self-managed GitLab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/321401

Jira integration should support OAuth: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/300195/

A

Hello, I'm patrick dooley, I'm the senior product manager for gitlab's ecosystem group, and I'm here for our 13 11 kickoff we're going to talk about the work that we'll be doing over the next month and in preparation for the 14-0 milestone coming up soon.

A

So there are two things that came up that are regarding deprecations that are going to take up a lot of time over the next milestone or two, so in 140, we'll be deprecating service templates. Now, back in the day in 1303, we added the project, integration management features and those are a set of features that allow you to integrate a service like jira with all of the projects inside a group or even instead of your whole instance.

A

Now service templates offered a similar bit of functionality before that so service. Template templates previously allowed you to create a template that applied to every new project that happened on that instance, but the problem is they're a template and those didn't get updated over time. So you added those properties on project creation like a jira integration and maybe you add, a hundred projects using that template. Well, what happens if you need to change the url for your jira installation? Now you have to go edit it a hundred times over, which is error prone.

A

That was a big reason that we added uh project integration management. We spent a ton of time on it, and so after we released it in 13 3, we added a deprecation note in 13 4. That said, we're going to go. Remove this feature. Service templates has a much more powerful new set of features you can use with project integration management. It solves all the same problems.

A

Does it in a much more powerful way, it's much easier to administrate, uh it's it's all around better and what we've seen since then we we added some telemetry in in august, and you can see that the usage of service templates has actually continued to grow. uh So we were planning on deprecating this feature in 14-0. We're still going to deprecate this feature, but we wanted to hedge a little bit.

A

So the the idea that we have now is, let's make sure for for users who are not currently using service templates, we're going to disable the feature entirely. It won't be in nav, you won't be able to add new service templates, and this will be the vast majority of users. As you can see, this is 2.

A

000 total service templates are in use across many millions of users, so for those who are currently using service templates, we're going to remove the ability to create new ones and we're going to remove the ability to edit existing ones. We're also going to hide any integration is from the service template table, so service template table shows you all integrations. You can create for anything.

A

So you'll only see the ones that you currently have configured and on those uh you'll see a banner that that reflects are on that page you'll see a banner that reflects all these changes, so your option will be you can remove them and you can create an instance level integration instead and that's it and then we'll follow this up in the next major version in 15.00 by deleting that functionality wholesale and what I'm hoping to see is over the next year, we'll see this template usage decline.

A

What I worry about is this is only 2 000 instances of this used, but because I know the customer base who's using this. These are large enterprises who have these service templates kind of baked into how they think about their workflow, and our expectation was to see a mass migration over to group integration and instance, integration, and we have seen a large uptick in that usage. But this number as long as it's continuing to steadily grow like that. That concerns me and I just don't- want to break anything. That's mission critical to anybody.

A

So that was a lot to say about that.

A

But it's a really interesting case where we we created something that has been really popular but apparently not popular enough to drive down usage of something something else that it was replacing additionally another one that we've we've moved away from a long while back integrations inside of gitlab used to be called project services and as part of the work on project integration management, we renamed it to integrations just to make it more clear when you call something a project service, but you can install it on a instance.

A

Like so, it's an instance project service like it just gets too complicated, so uh we decided to rename that- and there are still a few pieces left like there are a number of things that inside our code base have not been renamed. So there's a service params. We want to call integration, params, there's a services table that should be the integrations table.

A

There are some variables and values and objects that are called project, services or services that need to get renamed, and so, as this was potentially a breaking change for some things, we we want to release that in the 14-0 release. This is primarily for rsake.

A

uh This is going to primarily affect people who are developing gitlab, um but we want to put this in a major release because it is, it is going to be a pretty significant change inside the code base and it will also involve some database table migrations uh and name changes which will affect some downtime, and it's going to be it's going to be a significant lift.

A

So that's another one that we're in preparation for 14-0 we're going to be working on that now and over the next two milestones we'll make sure that that's in a good place. Meanwhile, we still have some work. That's happening on the jira front. um We have our engineer. Andy over here has been working on, creating a proxy for self-managed gitlab.

A

So the this, the shortest version of this is, if you're, using the atlassian connect application that works natively out of the box with gitlab.com and jira cloud, if you're using self-managed gitlab, uh the the application in the atlassian marketplace is pointing directly at gitlab.com.

A

So if you install that application, it assumes you're using gitlab.com if you're on self-hosted. We need a way to make sure those requests make it to your self-hosted instance. Now in this issue, there are a couple of things that are noted. There are ways that we've documented that you can do this anyway, you can install your own custom app.

A

You can publish your own custom app, uh you can put it in dev mode and and point it directly at your instance, but we also had andy had a great idea uh and sid actually brought it up as well. Our ceo brought it up on a call. Why not also try to proxy those requests.

A

So when requests come in to gitlab.com, that should be going to a self-managed instance, just proxy that request back over so andy's been investigating that we're going to continue to work towards that, and then additionally, we've got a piece of work that we need to do the next step we just released in 1310 the jira issue list details view. So if you're using jira issue list, you can see details that is available on gitlab.com today we're going to be removing the future flag in 1311, but the next step.

A

The next thing I want to see it has read only commenting. What we'd like to see is the ability to read, write so adding custom comments to add custom comments. You need to have an account. Otherwise all the comments would come from the admin account or whatever. So the jira integration needs to support oauth, and so libor has done an awesome job. Here there are a ton of awesome mock-ups. uh The current state right, like there's, only one set of credentials that that get attached to the jury, integration, there's a username and an api token.

A

We need to get to a state where an individual user can actually federate their atlassian account in and then use those credentials to submit comments. So that's the work that we're doing in 1311. It's going to be really exciting. It's always a little stressful when you do deprecations, so that's going to be a big month for us, uh but service templates going away. Project services has been long gone, but it's finally officially going away and we're going to continue to make some progress on the atlassian front. I'll see you next month have a good one.