Real-Time Working Group

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5. Real-Time Working Group

On this page

• Attributes
• Business Goal
• Exit Criteria - Phase 1
  • One Working Real-Time Feature, Usable by Single Instance/Small Cluster, Self-Hosting Customers => 100%
• Exit Criteria - Phase 2
  • One Working Real-Time Feature, Usable on larger deployments => 100%
  • Working, Real-Time Feature Available on .com => 100%
• Design Document
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Meetings

Attributes

Property	Value
Date Created	March 12, 2020
Date Closed	November 1, 2021
Slack	#wg_real-time (only accessible from within the company)
Google Doc	Real-Time Working Group Agenda (only accessible from within the company)
Epic & Design Doc	Use ActionCable for real-time features
Feature Issue	View real-time updates of assignee in issue / merge request sidebar
Associated OKRs	Plan: Support incremental ACV

Business Goal

To ship one real-time feature to self-managed customers.

Exit Criteria - Phase 1

(✅ Done, ✏️ In-progress)

One Working Real-Time Feature, Usable by Single Instance/Small Cluster, Self-Hosting Customers => 100%

• Supports starting Action Cable in embedded mode ✅
• Omnibus includes ability to start embedded Action Cable with config/cable.yml ✅
• GDK supports configuration of Action Cable ✅
• Workhorse Proxies Action Cable requests ✅
• Backend work is complete to upgrade websocket connections and push signal when assignees are updated on an issue ✅
• Frontend work is complete to respond to WebSockets with an update to the sidebar ✅
• Action Cable settings are exported to Prometheus ✅
• Track ActionCable settings in Usage Ping ✅
• Documentation enabled to advise customers on using the feature in small deployments ✅
• Feature usable conditionally when Action Cable is enabled ✅

Exit Criteria - Phase 2

(✅ Done, ✏️ In-progress)

One Working Real-Time Feature, Usable on larger deployments => 100%

• Omnibus includes ability to start standalone Action Cable Puma Server with config/cable.yml ✅
• GDK allows configuration of standalone Action Cable and starts Puma server ✅
• Workhorse Proxies Action Cable requests ✅
• Establish reference architectures for supporting WebSocket connections at scale ✅
• Helm charts allow configuration of embedded Action Cable in webservice service ✅
• QA work complete to test initial feature ✅
• Feature flag defaulted to on, with suitable fallback ✅

Working, Real-Time Feature Available on .com => 100%

• Containerization of Real-Time Feature including Action Cable and Puma ✅
• Update of Helm charts allowing use of multiple Redis instances ✅
• WebSocket requests supported in Kubernetes ✅
• Deployment to a non-production environment for manual, full-stack testing ✅
• Action Cable requests served by Kubernetes pods on Staging ✅
• Action Cable requests served by Kubernetes pods on Canary ✅
• Readiness-review complete to ensure observabilty & contain risk ✅
• Action Cable requests served by Kubernetes pods on Production ✅
• Default to embedded Action Cable enabled ✅

Design Document

Technical decisions and rationale are captured in this design document.

Roles and Responsibilities

Working Group Role	Person	Title
Executive Sponsor	Christopher Lefelhocz	VP of Development
Facilitator	John Hope	Engineering Manager, Plan
Functional Lead	Heinrich Lee Yu	Senior Backend Engineer, Plan
Functional Lead	Gabe Weaver	Senior Product Manager, Plan
Functional Lead	Sean McGivern	Staff Backend Engineer, Scalability
Member	Scott Stern	Frontend Engineer, Plan
Member	Ben Kochie	Site Reliability Engineer
Member	Natalia Tepluhina	Staff Frontend Engineer, Plan
Member	Matthias Käppler	Senior Engineer, Memory
Member	Jake Lear	Engineering manager, Plan

Meetings

Meetings are recorded and publicly available on YouTube in the Real-Time Working Group playlist.