Skip to content

About

The GitLab Playground is an experiment to test various features of GitLab, as well as see how able GitLab CI/CD is compared to GitHub. Presented by Alepouna.

Context

This expirement was not completely random. In the past, the FlyByWire Aircraft repo has faced GitHub action issues, specifically with the space of the GitHub action container running out of space. This is not mentioned anywhere on GitHub's documentation, nor there is a way to check this for past runs. This resulted in having to do some quick changes to purge specific folders when building the aircraft. We have not had issues since, but some random flukes where re-running the container seemed to fix this.

At the 19th of July 24, GitHub Actions suffered an outage (refer https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/m70hk23gx3nx) for about 4 hours. This meant that any new PRs for the aircraft could not be built to be tested by QA, pushes to the main branch would not build either (which meant the aircraft would not build, yet show an update on the FBW Installer [ciatation needed]) which could lead to confusion and of course support requests.

At the time of starting this project (15th Aug 24), GitHub suffered a major outage, with the entire site going down for about an hour. This meant that the entire repository was unavailable (viewing online, pull/pushes, PRs, issues), the FBW installer was showing 'unknown' for package versions (shown below) and of course

FBW Section Salty Section FSLTL Section

While this outage was resolved quickly, a few hours earlier to that there was another degradation of GitHub. Note: looking at the incident history of GitHub, issues are resolved relatively quickly, the biggest outage in the last 3 months (that affects our org) was for 4 hours (mentioned above).

During the first action outage (19th Jul), I (alepouna) wanted to run a small GitLab instance, just to backup the repository and have it build locally PRs to test so I can perform QA duties faster (big painpoint for QA) but due to side tracking with other projects and life, I never got around that. With todays (15th Aug) outage, I decided I should bring this instance up, and instead of just making it a solo endaviour, open it up to the rest of the FBW Team that might be interested to access and test around this system.

Purpose & Goals

With the context in mind, let's talk about the project purpose and goals. The GitLab instance, was initially created as a way to backup the repo and experiment with actions, however, after some quick discussion with Straks, in order to keep this project as an experiment and a playground, as well as prevent confusion with team members, the project will strictly be used as a playground. This means, it should not be used for any production or development use or backing up data.

The end goal of this experiment, is to conclude how viable using GitLab for our CI/CD process would be.

Experiments

Below is a list of all present and past experiments, with a link to their specific report page on the side of this page

Experiment statuses:

  • Planning: An idea exists, just no proper formal plan yet.
  • Planned: Probably waiting for a team decision, or infrastructure.
  • In Progress: Self-explanatory.
  • Completed: The experiment has completed according to its plan.
  • Cancelled: The experiment was cancelled.
Experiment Status
Repository Sync In Progress
Initial CI/CD Planning