This is the product vision for Configure in 2019 and beyond.
The Configure stage deals with the configuration and operation of applications and infrastructure, including Auto DevOps, Kubernetes integration, and ChatOps. We aim to make complex tasks (such as standing up new environments) fast and easy as well as providing operators all the necessary tools to execute their day-to-day actions upon their infrastructure.
Our vision for “Auto DevOps” is to leverage our single application to assist users in every phase of the development and delivery process, implementing automatic tasks that can be customized and refined to get the best fit for their needs.
With the dramatic increase in the number of projects being managed by software teams (especially with the rise of micro-services), it's no longer enough to just craft your code. In addition, you must consider all of the other aspects that will make your project successful, such as tests, quality, security, logging, monitoring, etc. It's no longer acceptable to add these things only when they are needed, or when the project becomes popular, or when there's a problem to address; on the contrary, all of these things should be available at inception.
e.g. “auto CI” to compile and test software based on best practices for the most common languages and frameworks, “auto review” with the help of automatic analysis tools like Code Climate, “auto deploy” based on Review Apps and incremental rollouts on Kubernetes clusters, and “auto metrics” to collect statistical data from all the previous steps in order to guarantee performances and optimization of the whole process. Dependencies and artifacts will be first-class citizens in this world: everything must be fully reproducible at any given time, and fully connected as part of the great GitLab experience.
Watch the video explaining our vision on Auto DevOps.
Taking full advantage of the power of the cloud computing model and container orchestration, cloud native is an innovative way to build and run applications. A big part of our cloud native strategy is around serverless. Serverless computing provides an easy way to build highly scalable applications and services, eliminating the pains of provisioning & maintaining.
Our Kubernetes integration provides a fast and easy way to standup clusters and start deploying your applications, however, we want to go further. Our vision for PaaS involves providing the necessary resources for your apps to run with zero configuration on the user's part. We will take the first steps to reach this goal.
The next generation of our ChatOps implementation will allow users to have a dedicated interface to configure, invoke, and audit ChatOps actions, doing it in a secure way through RBAC.
Incident Management will allow operators to have real-time view into the happenings of their systems. Building upon this concept, we envision rendering of runbook inside of GitLab as interactive documents for operators which in turn could trigger automation defined in gitlab-ci.yml.
Chaos engineering in a powerful practice that allows operators to architect powerful distributed systems that can withstand turbulent conditions. We want operators to be able to run downtime scenarios randomly to test the resilience of their architecture. Starting with the minimum units (pods) all the way the largest units (regions).
We want to leverage the latest features from chat platforms right within GitLab.
In general, we follow the same prioritization guidelines as the product team at large. Issues will tend to flow from having no milestone, to being added to the backlog, to being added to this page and/or a specific milestone for delivery.
You can see our entire public backlog for Configure at this link; filtering by labels or milestones will allow you to explore. If you find something you're interested in, you're encouraged to jump into the conversation and participate. At GitLab, everyone can contribute!
Issues with the "direction" label have been flagged as being particularly interesting, and are listed in the section below.
There are a number of other issues that we've identified as being interesting that we are potentially thinking about, but do not currently have planned by setting a milestone for delivery. Some are good ideas we want to do, but don't yet know when; some we may never get around to, some may be replaced by another idea, and some are just waiting for that right spark of inspiration to turn them into something special.
Remember that at GitLab, everyone can contribute! This is one of our fundamental values and something we truly believe in, so if you have feedback on any of these items you're more than welcome to jump into the discussion. Our vision and product are truly something we build together!