Gitaly Team
What is Gitaly?
The Gitaly team is responsible for building and maintaining systems to ensure
that the Git data storage tier of GitLab instances, and GitLab.com in particular,
is reliable, secure and fast. For more information about Gitaly, see the README in the repository and the roadmap below.
The team includes Backend Engineers and SREs collaborating to deliver a reliable, scalable and fast data storage to our customers.
Functional boundary
While GitLab is the primary consumer of the Gitaly project, Gitaly is a standalone product which can be used external to GitLab. As such, we strive to achieve a functional boundary around Gitaly. The goal of this is to ensure that the Gitaly project creates an interface to manage Git data, but does not make business decisions around how to manage the data.
For example, Gitaly can provide a robust and efficient set of APIs to move Git repositories between storage solutions, but it would be up to the calling application to decide when such moves should occur.
Processes fully independent of business inputs (such as repository maintenance) should be fully contained within Gitaly as they provide substantial value to anyone using the Gitaly project.
Roadmap
Please see the public product direction for Gitaly.
The vision and principles driving the roadmap can be found in the internal handbook.
The current roadmap is this epic board. See Roadmap planning below as to how this is managed.
Featured upcoming large architectural changes
Stable Counterparts
The following members of other functional teams are our stable counterparts:
| Name |
Role |
 Ameya Darshan
|
Security Engineer, Deploy:Environments, Systems:Gitaly, Systems:Geo, Delivery, Snippets |
 Costel Maxim
|
Senior Security Engineer, Application Security, Plan (Project Management, Product Planning, Certify), Create:Source Code, Growth, Fulfillment:Purchase, Fulfillment:Provision, Fulfillment:Utilization, Systems:Gitaly |
 Evan Read
|
Senior Technical Writer, Software Supply Chain Security:Compliance, Manage:Import and Integrate, Systems:Distribution, Systems:Gitaly |
 Furhan Shabir
|
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Systems:Gitaly |
 Gerardo Gutierrez
|
Senior Support Engineer, Systems:Gitaly |
 John McDonnell
|
Senior Software Engineer in Test, Systems:Gitaly |
 Mark Wood
|
Senior Product Manager, Systems:Gitaly |
 Vasilii Iakliushin
|
Staff Backend Engineer, Create:Source Code, Systems:Gitaly API |
Urgent issues and outages
If you’re not part of the Support organization, please consider seeking help from them first – Support has better availability and can help in most common cases.
If you still need help, please file an issue here. Post it on #g_gitaly for more immediate visibility and tag EM and PM, and the Support person you’re working with.
Future oncall rotation
NOTE: Gitaly is working on second-tier on-call coverage for well-defined emergencies only. This is not enabled yet; the tentative start date is 2025-01-01.
Please do not page oncall outside of these cases; contact Support instead!
- For production incidents only, SRE or IMOC on-call can page the current Gitaly oncall manually.
- For customer emergencies, Support engineers and managers can page the current Gitaly oncall manually.
- If you’re working on a customer emergency but not part of Support, please contact Support instead.
For these cases, use /pd trigger on Slack, then select the Gitaly rotation. For all other cases please file an issue under Customer issues.
Customer issues
Please file an issue here. Post it on #g_gitaly for more immediate visibility.
A note on customer escalations and engagements
We are happy to help when a customer needs it! But please keep in mind that we are primarily a development team, not equipped for “field engineering”.
Our engineers can help, preferably async, with:
- deep technical investigation based on data and able technical collaboration, in close partnership with Support and CSM
- providing product-level fixes or improvements, work to be scheduled and results released as usual, under direction of EM and PM
- improving our documentation if something’s unclear
Engineering Managers (@jcaigitlab & @andrashorvath) and Product Managers (@mjwood) are also happy to engage with customers if you need assistance clarifying roadmaps, product features and timelines, or to ensure the correct prioritization.
We are not a good fit however if you need:
- advice on GitLab instance configuration or architecture in self-hosted scenarios (Reference Architectures and Professional Services can help)
- engagements without clear exit criteria (please clarify them first, “let’s jump on a call to discuss” is usually in this category)
- long-term “advise us” scenarios (please refer to Support and the documentation, or engage Professional Services)
This epic discusses possible development of this engagement model.
Normal priority requests
To get Gitaly team work on something, it’s best to create an issue on the Gitaly issue tracker
and add the group::gitaly and workflow::problem validation labels,
along with any other appropriate labels. Then, feel free to tag the relevant
Product Manager and/or Engineering Manager as listed above.
For information requests and other quick one-offs, feel free to use #g_gitaly on Slack to get attention on the issue.
Issues with Infradev labels
These are typically Corrective Actions or other followup items that have strict
SLO tracking. They will be scheduled through either of the above paths, by EM
and/or PM polling these dashboards.
Gitaly oncall rotation
Gitaly team is in the process of establishing an oncall rotation to provide focused expertise to production SaaS systems. This is currently in pilot, and replaces the Incident Manager On-Call (IMOC) and Engineer On-Call (EOC) responsibilities for Gitaly team members. The tentative start date is 2025-01-01.
- Rotation is staffed during working hours of team members (no weekends). This still covers 24h of workdays, given the distribution of Gitaly team members, but without guarantees (see Who is oncall below)
- Weekends are explicitly out of scope (not staffed), and escalation must fall back to the current EOC rotation.
- Given that responsibilities are only during working hours, there’s no additional compensation unless explicitly specified otherwise.
- You can choose to take time in lieu via Workday, selecting
the On-Call Time in Lieu option after a shift.
- Gitaly team members are expected to provide technical assistance for ONLY the cases described in Urgent issues and outages
- There is no intention to trigger this rotation directly from monitoring at this time.
- All contact must follow the process described in How to contact the team above, including who and why can page.
- Team members provide 15 minutes response time while oncall.
- The team member on-call is expected to be available and reachable (but not necessarily actively working, as long as you can start the investigation within this SLO.)
- If paged less than 15 minutes before the end of a shift, you still must respond and explicitly hand off the incident.
- Ongoing production incidents and customer escalations are explicitly handed off by the person leaving shift to the next Gitaly oncall using the incident channel on Slack.
Training material
Joining the rotation
File and complete a Production Training issue. It includes instructions for joining the rotation.
Who is oncall
The source of truth is the PagerDuty rotation. If you’re scheduled but want to take PTO, you’re responsible for finding coverage. (In case of emergencies, managers will take over this duty.)
Roster management
Please refer to https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/on-call/#pagerduty for the mechanics (swapping oncall, adding new team members to the rotation).
Cluster team
Mission: Provide a durable, performant, and reliable Git storage layer for GitLab.
Responsibilities |
In the product hierarchy
Working with product
Agile workflow in Gitaly
We generally follow the Product Development Flow to schedule and track our work.
Work is executed in small chunks (2-3 days of work), each tracked as an issue. This allows for natural “checkpoints” for safe context switching.
Triaging and scheduling is separate from executing the current work. All incoming work is tracked and we are intentional about picking up new work.
Incoming work of all kind (both projects and ad-hoc interrupts) passes by EM and PM for triage. There may be some engineering consultation here about feasibility,
fit with the product’s strategy roadmap etc. Some will get scheduled, some goes to the backlog. If the effort is not deemed necessary or not believed
to align with the roadmap, we will close the issue with commentary as to why it is not being pursued for future reference.
We aim to scope milestones such that we have a task list that is ambitious, but not overwhelming. We deliberatly leave some capacity for incoming incidents.
We want to avoid the feeling of a never ending mountain of work to promote a healthy work / life balance.
It is also important to stress that milestones are recommendations only and we work on a best effort basis.
For issues with a strict SLO, we follow the process defined below
We use the following workflow labels on the issues:
workflow::problem validation - A good spot to put features that we may / may not want to pursue. This is where product can do some user interviews, cost analysis, market fit, etc to decide if it’s an opportunity we wish to pursue.workflow::solution validation - Use this label for features / issues where Engineering needs to investigate / propose a solution going forward, or break it down into smaller issues.workflow::planning breakdown - Issues ready to be scheduled in the next few milestones (unblocked or soon unblocked, with a known solution). Leaders of long-running (pre-approved) projects use this to communicate with PM.workflow::ready for development - Work that is scheduled for a milestone (either the current one, or one in the future).workflow::in dev - Actively being worked by the Engineering teamworkflow::in review - Work that is in reviewworkflow::verification - code is in production and pending verification by the DRI engineerworkflow::complete - changes are verified, issue can be closed
Issues that we definitely want to prioritize for a release receive a Deliverable label and are moved to the top of the list.
These Deliverable issues help show our commitment to GitLab and our customers around working on these issues.
Workflow
Project Work
The top level Gitaly epic
contains linked epics representing projects the team is working on. Team members
will either be the primary owner of an epic, or
a supporting contributor. This way knowledge gets
shared across the team.
DRI & Supporting contributors
The DRI of an epic
will be responsible for making decisions
regarding technical direction of a project. Making a decision will involve
creating proposals and gathering feedback from peers and the Engineering
Manager. It also involves reaching out and collaborating with stakeholders
external to the team when applicable.
The DRI is also responsible for project management, which means
keeping the epic up to date with relevant issues, removing issues that are no
longer relevant, and writing weekly updates in the form of a comment in the epic
with the following format:
## Weekly Update YYYY-MM-DD
### Progress this week
### Blockers
The supporting contributor(s) of an epic will be responsible for supporting the
DRI in working on issues, reviewing MRs, and participating in technical
discussions. The secondary owner can also act as the primary owner when the
DRI is OOO, depending on their bandwidth.
Supporting contributors are highly recommended but optional. There can also be
multiple seconary owners for a project.
Not everyone needs to be a DRI, but everyone should be a supporting contributor
on at least one project.
The structure of having both DRIs and supporting contributors does not introduce
any hard requirements for moving MRs forward, as reviews and approvals can be
done by anyone on the team.
Technical Roadmap & Customer Issues
The Gitaly technical roadmap
and Gitaly customer issues
epics contain one-off issues that are not a part of any projects, but are important
issues to address. These issues will be sorted by priority. Team members can
pick up work from this board in addition to issues they are working on as part
of project epics.
As a rule of thumb, the ratio of project work to technical
roadmap and customer issues should be roughly 70/30.
Urgent and high priority issues
P1/S1 issues should be treated with urgency. If such issues have not been
scheduled, bias for action is encouraged.
Go ahead and pull them into the current milestone, but do notify the EM and PM.
Blocked issues
If your work is blocked, use workflow::blocked and set a blocking issue for
clarity. Then consider asking for help and/or helping to unblock another team
member’s blocked work before picking up something else.
Issues blocked for a long time should be removed from this process by removing the milestone and unassigning.
Adding more work for the team
Everyone can file new issues as more work is discovered, and feed them into this
process. To do so, file an issue, tag EM and PM, and assign workflow::planning breakdown without a milestone. Please explain both what needs to be done and
why (ie the impact and urgency), and make it clear whether the work is ready
to be picked up. (This is also how project DRIs add the next steps in their
projects to the workflow.)
A weekly call is held between the product manager and engineering managers (of
both Gitaly and Git teams). Everyone is welcome to join and these calls are
used to discuss any roadblocks, concerns, status updates, deliverables, or other
thoughts that impact the group.
Roadmap planning
The current roadmap is this epic board. It consists of themes/projects running for a quarter or longer (in some cases, much longer). It is okay to add sub-projects directly to the roadmap in the latter case.
- Anyone can propose a project: file an epic and discuss with the team (and EM+PM). Don’t forget the
group::gitaly label.
- Once accepted, we add the
Roadmap label.
- Ongoing roadmap items get
roadmap::now, while roadmap::next and roadmap::later show what’s been triaged and pushed into the future for now.
- At each quarterly planning:
- we review roadmap items (using arguments from the vision and principles, current business priorities etc)
- and then take on OKRs that push those goals forward.
Quarterly Planning
Quarterly planning is done before every quarter for the next 3 milestones, with
input from everyone. At that time, we must already have a good idea of the work
that needs to be done.
The process is as follows:
-
EM+PM (with input from engineers and stakeholders): decide the scope we’ll be
working on, which will align with department level OKRs.
-
EM+PM+Engineers: Based on roadmap items, file smaller epics/issues if needed
that can be completed in 3 milestones (ie one quarter). Tie them to the
overall project epics. This is where we’ll track the actual work.
-
EM: Modify the top level Gitaly epic
to reflect the work.
-
PM: Once the scope of the quarter is clear, take the list of issues and
assign one of the three milestones, along with workflow::planning breakdown (for large issues in need of breakdown) or workflow::ready for development.
-
Engineers: help break down workflow::planning breakdown items and file
smaller issues if needed, adding them to the same 3 milestones as reasonable.
Raise exceptions as needed.
Handling issues with strict SLO
Issues with Infradev label are typically Corrective Actions or other followup items that have strict
SLO tracking. They will be scheduled through either of the above paths, by EM
and/or PM polling these dashboards:
Infradev Dashboard
Past due Infradev issues
-
EM+PM: Poll the dashboards at least weekly. Triage and schedule these issues so that SLOs can be met. If needed, move the issue to the Gitaly tracker, or file a proxy issue there so that it shows up on work boards, and mark it as blocking. Drag issues to the top of the workflowready for development column.
-
EM+PM: If the issue is blocked or depends on ongoing work, add a Milestone that fits the SLO and the pending work (so that we don’t forget it). Ensure that blocking work gets scheduled before.
-
Engineers: please prioritize picking up this work, and post frequent (at most weekly, even if no changes) updates in the original issue. Mark any blocking issues as such.
Gitaly consumers
To have a constant communication flow about planned changes, updates and maybe
breaking changes we have the #g_gitaly Slack channel. In the
channel we will provide updates for all teams using the service but also ask
for assistance to provide feedback and insights about planned changes or improvements.
To support this pro-active communication additionally there is also an individual
counterpart on the consumer side to help with research in the codebases and
coordination with all the teams consuming Gitaly. The DRI on Consumer side is Igor Drozdov.
The Gitaly consumers are:
Gitaly Deprecations
Gitaly offers many customer facing features. As such, all deprecations to customer facing features will follow the standard GitLab feature deprecations guidance and announced within the deprecations documentation page.
Gitaly also offers many non-customer facing features, which are used by GitLab and other customers who directly interface with Gitaly. These Gitaly level deprecations will not be announced using the above methods as they are not designed for GitLab end users to interface with directly. Some examples of these non-customer facing features are storage level APIs, which should never be called by GitLab users.
Metrics
On gitlab.com
Useful links
Dashboards
Team development
Onboarding
To complete team-specific onboarding, please file an issue
here.
Offboarding
Maintainer rights are revoked, and to remove the developer from the list of
authorized approvers, remove them from the gl-gitaly GitLab.com group.
About this document
This document is intended for Gitaly engineers, to become familiar with GitLab’s production layout and gain the ability to effectively debug production problems. While the focus is on SaaS, many of the skills transfer also to debugging self-managed instances.
Generic GitLab background
Skim / read the following, focusing on an overview then on Gitaly:
Other useful links:
Gitaly specific background
Gitaly in Production
Both gitlab.com and Dedicated use Gitaly in “sharded” mode, that is, without Praefect (Gitaly Cluster).
Ahmad Sherif
Andras Horvath