GitLab Incubation Engineering, 12 Oct 2022

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From YouTube: Incubation Engineering Server Runtime - Weekly Demo 2022-10-12

Description

This is the first weekly update for the Incubation Engineering - Server Runtime SEG. In this video, Shekhar walks you through what is Server Runtime and gives a demo of a prototype control plane that can provision environments / IDEs for the user.

Chapters
0:00 Hello! and What is Server Runtime
1:13 First goal - Custom Control Plane
2:18 VS Code Demo
4:59 vim Demo

A

Hello, everyone welcome to the first update uh for the server runtime seg, um so first of all, I would like to say hello, I joined about three weeks ago uh to work on server, runtime and I'm, so excited to be here.

A

um The question I've been asked multiple times already is what is server at time, and so the answer is pretty simple. uh Today on gitlab, we have the ability to edit code using uh our web IDE, but what we can't do is run our code or run tests. The server runtime gives you that, so it gives you the ability, you have a full runtime environment, which you can run your code and test.

A

um So this is a pretty big space, um and so the question is: what's the first problem, you're going to tackle um and again I'm lucky to be working very closely with the editor group. Who've done a lot of work in this space already, so they have already embedded vs code as an IDE to replace the current web IDE um and they're, also working on a way to uh to embed Eclipse J um into gitlab right, and so that that investigation, which is ongoing.

A

um The problem I wanted to tackle is is related to having a complete server runtime like J, but an alternative to that. So what I would really want to do is build a custom control plane and the goal to the control pane are going to be such that one it can be installed in any kubernetes cluster.

A

The second thing I want is to have really tight integration with gitlab, and what that means is things like authentication things like having the right extensions installed, um being able to provision an environment right from gitlab very easily to be able to view your environments in gitlab, so I want that whole experience and, of course, I want people to offer a multitude of different ID experiences through this, so not just vs code, but things like Jupiter, Hub, vim and not just Ides, with the UI but also headless Ides, that you can connect their own IDE to the server runtime environment.

A

Now. um The idea is also that this can be run on the customer's cluster, but also on our own classes on gitlab.com, so we could potentially support a free or paid offering by running it on our own clusters. With that I've been working on a on a prototype for a custom control. Pane I would love to take you through that, so the journey really starts from any repository um and I've got this very basic.

A

Go example set up here, so there's nothing special about this repository other than the fact that it's got this gitlab experiments yaml file and all this really has a defined your development environment. So it's got an image that describes a development environment, and so this image is just a normal Docker image containing vs code go and a few go extensions.

A

So if I go ahead and I um click on a link here, so I'll just provide a link here which takes it currently to my own domain, where we could host this obviously on on gitlab and all you need to pass to this is your project and a ref.

A

um So if I go ahead and click that it goes and starts provisioning in my environment, so what it does is in the kubernetes cluster it Provisions pods and Ingress and services, and things like that and and soon to come volumes and starts and starts, uh starts creating a DNS entry so that we can actually be navigated to the IDE. Now it's going to take a few seconds, I'll pause. The video here.

A

So, as you can see, it's gone ahead and provisioned an environment for me, so startup vs code um and, as you can see, it's actually cloned the repository as well um and I can access my main.co file as you can see. So um it's also. It's also installed the go extension for vs code. I can go ahead and start a new terminal right um and I can go ahead and actually run the program, so I can say, go runway.go and that would actually run the program.

A

And you can see that so I can go ahead and run the program. I could actually make changes to this program as well and because I have the the go extension it would, you know: do things like auto correction and uh re recreate import so, for example, I removed the import that I removed the reference to the library and sort of move, the importance, the class that that's done by the actual um extension itself. So now I can go ahead and commit my code.

A

So once I'm in my change, I can go ahead and commit my code and because I'm already authenticated um it, it will just. Let me push right. So I can go ahead. I just need to configure my email address, commit.

A

A

And so uh so so that's the experience. I've got an environment which has all the tools installed. I can go and push I just want to quickly. Show you another example that I have this time: it's not going to BBS code, but uh vim and emacs. Instead, uh so I'll show you another uh shell script uh example that I've got so. This is a very simple shell script and we've got again a gitlab experiments file, which has which runs dtyd and also has women emacs installed.

A

So if I go ahead and click on um provision, it's going to go again, start creating all the components of the Ingress and the Pod, and things like that and it's going to go ahead and and wait for the uh DNS to become reachable.

A

Once that's successful, you can see that it's gone ahead and started a terminal window and I can look at the file again. It has cloned. My repository and I can start editing my script. If I wanted to do right, so I've got the full whim experience. I can have them extension installed as well, so I can go ahead and you know save and close Etc I can also push as I would normally. I could also start emacs in this one, because I also have emacs installed so I.

A

Can you know I have the the emac experience that I want I. Have that as well? I can also run my code Etc right from here. So again. um What I want to tackle next after this is the ability to run headless IDE so where you run your IDE locally, but connect to this server, runtime and also I haven't done authentication for the Ides. Yet there's authentication for the bot that actually Provisions the environment, but no authentication with the Ides. So that's what I want to tackle next. Thank you for listening. Everyone.