⛅🌱 Cloud Seed

GitLab is the one DevOps platform. Teams use GitLab (SaaS or self-managed) for development, planning, collaboration and automation. However, digital transformation is incomplete without cloud adoption.

Thus, Cloud Seed — a collaboration with Google Cloud — makes it trivial to consume cloud services from GitLab.

Capabilities

Generate Google Cloud Service Accounts

Service accounts are authentication credentials that can be generated from the GitLab web interface
Used for a wide range of integrations and automation with Google Cloud services

Deploy to Google Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a fully managed deployment platform for containerized applications
Setup automated deployments to Cloud Run via the GitLab web interface including support for Preview Environments
Every Git commit, branch and tag is automatically deployed to the appropriate Cloud Run service environment

Provision Google Cloud SQL databases

Provision popular database instances easily from the GitLab web interface
Support all major versions of PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Service
Generate instances, databases and users to be used with deployment and test automations
Environment (i.e. Git ref) aware database provisioning

Usecases

Cloud native development with automated deployments to Cloud Run
Cloud migration and app modernization with Cloud SQL relational databases

Positive business outcomes (grouped by persona)

List of user personas with specific benefits they actualize:

Compliance Manager, Security Analyst, Security Operations Engineer
- Secure, standardized deployment pipelines across the organization
- GitLab-Google Cloud driven authorization and permission model
Product Manager, Product Designer
- Preview environments to validate feature branches
Development Team Lead, Software Developer, Platform Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
- Continuous deployment for all Git commits, branches and environments
- Easy deployment automation and database provisioning
- Preview environments to validate feature branches
Systems Administrator, Infrastructure Operator
- Secure, standardized deployment pipelines across the organization
- Principled GitOps with application source and infrastructure state
Application Ops, Release Manager
- Standardized pipelines for release automation
- Support for feature, test and production release environments
Application Development Director
- Increase Operational Efficiencies
- Deliver Better Products Faster
- Reduce Security and Compliance Risk

Jobs to be Done

Deploy web applications
- ☑️ Authentication and authorization
- ☑️ Deployment credential generation
- ☑️ Provisioning and enablement of cloud services
- ☑️ Deployment pipelines
- ☑️ Preview environments
Provision cloud data stores
- ☑️ Authentication and authorization
- ☑️ Database instance generation
- ☑️ Database and user setup
- ⏳ Networking configuration

Open source

Cloud Seed is an open-source program led by GitLab Incubation Engineering.

Everyone can contribute

There are several ways one may contribute to Cloud Seed. These are listed below:

Become a Cloud Seed Trusted Tester in GitLab and share feedback
If you are familiar with Ruby on Rails and/or Vue.js, consider contributing to GitLab as a developer. Much of Cloud Seed is an internal module within the GitLab code base
If your familiarity lies with GitLab pipelines, consider contributing to the Cloud Seed Library project
If your expertize is in Google Cloud APIs and Google Cloud technologies, reach out to us, we need you!