Rate Limit Architecture Working Group

1. You are here:
2. Meet the GitLab team
3. Organizational Structure
4. Working Groups
5. Rate Limit Architecture Working Group

On this page

• Attributes
  • Context
  • Exit Criteria
  • Roles and Responsibilities
  • Proposed Schedule
    • Week of 2022-05-02
    • Week of 2022-05-09
    • Week of 2022-05-16
    • Week of 2022-05-23
    • Week of 2022-05-30

Attributes

Property	Value
Date Created	2022-04-27
Target End Date	2022-05-30
Slack	#wg_rate_limit_architecture (only accessible from within the company)
Google Doc	Agenda (TBA) (only accessible from within the company)

Context

During FY23-Q1 we prioritized an engineering allocation for Rate Limiting Across DevOps Platform focused on identifying and addressing denial of service (DoS) vectors via rate and application limits. So far that effort has been successful in addressing dozens of DoS related issues.

In addition to addressing DoS vectors to ensure high availability we have goals around:

• consistent monitoring and alerting on limits
• consistent, comprehensive documentation of limits
• synchronization of GitLab.com limit settings with GitLab default limits

Currently there are multiple approaches to rate limiting documented in GitLab application limits development documentation.

Exit Criteria

This Working Group has the following goals:

1. Develop a recommendation for the preferred way to implement application rate limits within GitLab
2. Document this recommendation for GitLab developers

Roles and Responsibilities

Working Group Role	Person	Title
Executive Sponsor	Christopher Lefelhocz	VP of Development
Facilitator	Sam Goldstein	Director Engineering, Ops
Functional Lead
Functional Lead
Member	Grzegorz Bizon	Principal Engineer, Verify
Member	Fabio Pitino	Staff Backend Engineer, Verify
Member	Quang-Minh Nguyen	Senior Backend Engineer, Scalability
Member	Liam McAndrew	Engineering Manager, Scalability
Member	Markus Koller	Senior Backend Engineer, Integrations
Member	Grant Hickman	Sr Product Manager, Integrations

Proposed Schedule

Overview of planned work. This may change as we iterate.

Week of 2022-05-02

• Kick off meeting (sync/async)
  • Intros - get to know each other
  • Review WG goals and schedule, provide feedback
  • Review recent work on Rate Limits (e.g. Rate Limiting Across DevOps Platform)

Week of 2022-05-09

• Brainstorming Session (sync/async)
  • Brainstorm/propose various directions for Rate Limit architecture
  • Discuss potential tradeoffs
    • Identify areas requiring followup investigation or testing
  • Assign followup actions

Week of 2022-05-16

• Follow up investigation from brainstorming session

Week of 2022-05-23

• Determine recommended architecture
• Identify documentation, handbook, and/or architecture blueprint references that should be updated
• Assign documentation followup actions

Week of 2022-05-30

• Complete documentation followup actions
• Closing meeting (sync/async)