Cloud Resources for Developer Relations

This page outlines cloud resources and workflows used by the Developer Relations team at GitLab. It provides guidance on managing and allocating resources effectively, ensuring that team members can leverage cloud infrastructure for community apps, demo projects, and contributor success tools while maintaining best practices for both long-term production environments and short-lived individual resources.

Cloud Resources

Google Cloud Resources

The Google Cloud project group-community-a29572 is used for:

Name	Type	Scope	Team	Resources	Notes
Community App (UTM, URL Shortener)	Service	Production	Developer Advocacy	EC2 VM, Cloud Run (router, QR code), SQL (API)	handbook
Demo projects	Demos	Testing/Staging	Developer Advocacy	GKE clusters, VMs, DNS	handbook
Contributors Success	Storage/Traffic	Production	Contributors Success	Storage	GDK-in-a-box virtual images

When provisioned, you can access the project in the Google Cloud Console. Quick access:

1. Compute Overview
2. Kubernetes Engine
3. Cloud Run
4. SQL
5. Cloud Storage
6. IAM & Admin

Technical owners: @johncoghlan @dnsmichi

Workflow

1. All Developer Relations team members can manage resources in Google Cloud in the community-group project using the Editor role.
   • This access is not provisioned by default. Create an access request to add/remove team members (example: group update AR).
2. Google Cloud/AWS also allows to register domains that are not trademarked (internal) and use the domains for demo setups.

Demo environments

For customer facing demo environments, review the existing resources before creating new environments:

1. Demo systems handbook: GitLab Learn Labs.
2. Developer Advocacy content handbook: Product tours, click-through demos, workshops, etc.

Long-term production environments

For demos that require debugging the deployments, prefer shared resources, for example in Google Cloud.

1. Document access in the 1Password vault if not available through SSO login.
2. Shutdown resources when not needed (for example, idle Kubernetes clusters).

Individual short-lived resources

For individual short-lived tutorials or demo setups for a blog post, prefer the Cloud Sandbox Realm for AWS or GCP. This provides automated shutdown, generated domains for easier access, etc.

Decision workflow

flowchart TD;
  A{Shared resource access required?}
  A -->|Yes| B[Use cloud group resources]
  A -->|No| C{Short-lived}
  C --> |Yes| D[Use individual Cloud Sandbox projects]
  C --> |No| B