Distribution ensures the experience of installing and maintaining GitLab is easy and safe for everyone. It is Distribution team's task to think about the widest variety of installation/update use-cases and provide a solution that will satisfy most needs. Distribution is there to provide the best possible experience for a user that is a novice but also a veteran when it comes to installing and maintaining software.
Distribution team vision is shown below, and not limited to:
The following people are members of the Distribution Team:
Person | Role |
---|---|
New Vacancy - David M. (Interim) | Engineering Manager, Distribution |
David 'DJ' Mountney | Senior Distribution Engineer |
Jason Plum | Senior Distribution Engineer |
Ian Baum | Senior Distribution Engineer |
Balasankar "Balu" C | Distribution Engineer |
Robert Marshall | Distribution Engineer |
Hossein Pursultani | Distribution Engineer |
The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:
Person | Role |
---|---|
Amarbayar Amarsanaa | Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Distribution & Package |
New Vacancy - Joshua Lambert (interim) | Product Manager, Distribution |
Distribution team is responsible for:
Based on team responsibilities, the following objectives apply:
Distribution
label.Name | Location | Description |
---|---|---|
Omnibus GitLab | gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab | Build Omnibus packages with HA support for LTS versions of all major Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS/RHEL, OpenSUSE, SLES |
Docker All in one GitLab image | gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/docker | Build Docker images for GitLab CE/EE based on the omnibus-gitlab package |
GitLab Helm Chart | charts/gitlab | Cloud Native GitLab Helm Charts |
Docker images for GitLab Helm Chart | gitlab-org/build/CNG | Individual images used by GitLab Helm Charts |
GitLab Helm Chart operator | gitlab-org/distribution/gitlab-operator | Support project for GitLab Helm Charts, performing various tasks such as zero downtime upgrade |
Kubernetes Helm Charts index | charts/charts.gitlab.io | Helm charts repository index |
AWS images | AWS marketplace | AWS image based on the omnibus-gitlab package |
Kubernetes helm charts | Official Helm Charts | Application definitions for Kubernetes Helm based on the omnibus-gitlab package |
GitLab provisioner | gitlab-org/distribution/gitlab-provisioner | Creates a GitLab HA installation using Ansible and Terraform |
GitLab PCF tile | gitlab.com/gitlab-pivotal | One click installation of GitLab in Pivotal Cloud Foundry based on the omnibus-gitlab package |
GitLab Terraform configuration | gitlab-terraform | Terraform configuration for various cloud providers |
Omnibus GitLab Builder | GitLab Omnibus Builder | Create environment containing build dependencies for the omnibus-gitlab package |
Upgrade time metrics | Upgrade time metrics page on GL Pages | Stores the result of calculation of time needed for upgrade between versions in chart form. Backed by Google sheets. Hosted using GL Pages |
Licenses of bundled dependencies | Licenses page on GL Pages | Webpage listing the bundled dependencies in each package along with their license. |
All work carried out by the Distribution team is public. Some exceptions apply:
Some of the team work is carried out on our development server at dev.gitlab.org
. Infrastructure overview document lists the reasons.
Unless your work is related to the security, all other work is carried out in projects on GitLab.com
. If you need to submit a sensitive issue, please use confidential issues.
If you are unsure whether something needs to remain private, check with the team Engineering Manager.
In addition to general company on-boarding and off-boarding, Distribution team has its own process to get new team members up to speed more quickly.
If you are starting with your onboarding, open an issue in Distribution team issue tracker, select Team-onboarding
template and assign the issue to yourself.
Going through the steps noted in the issue should be your top priority, higher than the general company on-boarding issue. This is because items in team on-boarding are specific to your role and it will allow you to get up-to-speed quicker.
Off-boarding should be carried out by the Engineering Manager of the team, using the appropriate issue template in the same issue tracker.
General resources available to developers are listed in the Engineering handbook.
In the Distribution team specifically, everyone should have access to the testground
project on Google Cloud Platform. If you don't have access, ask the team lead by creating issue in Distribution team issue tracker and label it Access Request
.
As part of the team responsibilities, team owns maintenance of infrastructure used for day to day work. For list of nodes and description of the maintenance tasks, see the infastructure and maintenance page.
We set aside one day per month to work on pet projects that are improving GitLab. For more details, see open work day page.
General engineering workflow applies to the Distribution team. Since Distribution is working across multiple projects, our team workflow is further explained and summarised on the Distribution workflow page.
Everything that is done in GitLab will end up in the supported installation methods that are distributed to users. While that sounds like the last link in the chain, it is one of the most important ones. This means that informing the Distribution team of a change in an early stage is crucial for releasing your feature. While last minute changes are inevitable and can happen, we should strive to avoid them.
We expect every team to reach out to the Distribution team before scheduling a feature in an upcoming release in the following cases:
To sum up the above list:
If you need to do install
, update
, make
, mkdir
, mv
, cp
, chown
, chmod
, do compilation or configuration change in any part of GitLab stack, you need to reach out to the Distribution team for opinion as early as possible.
This will allow us to schedule appropriately the changes (if any) we have to make to the packages.
If a change is reported late in the release cycle or not reported at all, your feature/change might not be shipped within the release.
If you have any doubt whether your change will have an impact on the Distribution team, don't hesitate to ping us in your issue and we'll gladly help.