Compliance Frameworks ADR 007: External Custom Requirements

Context

Allow users to create controls to expand on what GitLab offers by default.

External Requirements

• Since we can’t reliably predict what kinds of data will be useful for external services, we will initially start out by pinging external services with just project settings attached.
• To avoid complicating role design and needing to control privileges specifically for external controls, we will use the shared HMAC secret for authentication.

Constraints

1. We aim to use the built-in delayed worker execution in Sidekiq to handle defaulting ending status checks to fail after the timeout is hit. In case of an incident where the worker queue list would have to be cleared, we accept that there would be controls in pending state (for longer than the regular timeout) until the next regular schedule triggers a new round of evaluation (currently set at every 12 hours). Worst case should be that status is stale for 11h30m (schedule - regular timeout).

Decision

We decided to let external services post the status of their controls back to us in an async manner, allowing for more time to let them perform more complex checks. This will be especially helpful if they need to request additional data to evaluate (from GitLab itself or other sources).