Skip to content

[Feature flag] Rollout of `cluster_vulnerabilities`

Summary

This issue is to rollout cluster vulnerabilities on production, that is currently behind the cluster_vulnerabilities feature flag.

Owners

  • Team: Container Security
  • Most appropriate slack channel to reach out to: #g_protect_container_security
  • Best individual to reach out to: Alexander Turinske
  • PM: Sam White

Expectations

What are we expecting to happen?

A user will be able to see the vulnerabilities related to a specific cluster

What might happen if this goes wrong?

A user will not be able to see the vulnerabilities related to a specific cluster

What can we monitor to detect problems with this?

User feedback

Rollout Steps

Rollout on non-production environments

  • Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to non-production environments.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status d601573f30a9473e4fb37f7df859397a9820f0ab
  • Enable the feature globally on non-production environments.
    • /chatops run feature set cluster_vulnerabilities true --dev
    • /chatops run feature set cluster_vulnerabilities true --staging
  • Verify that the feature works as expected. Posting the QA result in this issue is preferable.

Specific rollout on production

  • Ensure that the feature MRs have been deployed to both production and canary.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status d601573f30a9473e4fb37f7df859397a9820f0ab
  • If you're using project-actor, you must enable the feature on these entries:
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-org/protect/demos/sandbox/test-cis-with-agentid cluster_vulnerabilities true
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-org/gitlab cluster_vulnerabilities true
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-org/gitlab-foss cluster_vulnerabilities true
    • /chatops run feature set --project=gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com cluster_vulnerabilities true
  • Verify that the feature works on the specific entries. Posting the QA result in this issue is preferable.

Preparation before global rollout

  • Check if the feature flag change needs to be accompanied with a change management issue. Cross link the issue here if it does.
  • Ensure that you or a representative in development can be available for at least 2 hours after feature flag updates in production. If a different developer will be covering, or an exception is needed, please inform the oncall SRE by using the @sre-oncall Slack alias.
  • Ensure that documentation has been updated (More info).
  • Announce on the feature issue an estimated time this will be enabled on GitLab.com.
  • If the feature might impact the user experience, notify #support_gitlab-com and your team channel (more guidance when this is necessary in the dev docs).

Global rollout on production

All /chatops commands that target production should be done in the #production slack channel for visibility.

(Optional) Release the feature with the feature flag

If you're still unsure whether the feature is deemed stable but want to release it in the current milestone, you can change the default state of the feature flag to be enabled. To do so, follow these steps:

  • Create a merge request with the following changes. Ask for review and merge it.
  • Ensure that the default-enabling MR has been deployed to both production and canary. If the merge request was deployed before the code cutoff, the feature can be officially announced in a release blog post.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status 38e34090ed9b4e942d7dc58ff40ef7e331c698f4
  • Close the feature issue to indicate the feature will be released in the current milestone.
  • Set the next milestone to this rollout issue for scheduling the flag removal.
  • (Optional) You can create a separate issue for scheduling the steps below to Release the feature.
    • Set the title to "[Feature flag] Cleanup cluster_vulnerabilities".
    • Execute the /copy_metadata <this-rollout-issue-link> quick action to copy the labels from this rollout issue.
    • Link this rollout issue as a related issue.
    • Close this rollout issue.

WARNING: This approach has the downside that it makes it difficult for us to clean up the flag. For example, on-premise users could disable the feature on their GitLab instance. But when you remove the flag at some point, they suddenly see the feature as enabled and they can't roll it back to the previous behavior. To avoid this potential breaking change, use this approach only for urgent matters.

Release the feature

After the feature has been deemed stable, the clean up should be done as soon as possible to permanently enable the feature and reduce complexity in the codebase.

  • Create a merge request to remove cluster_vulnerabilities feature flag. Ask for review and merge it.
    • Remove all references to the feature flag from the codebase.
    • Remove the YAML definitions for the feature from the repository.
    • Create a changelog entry.
  • Ensure that the cleanup MR has been deployed to both production and canary. If the merge request was deployed before the code cutoff, the feature can be officially announced in a release blog post.
    • /chatops run auto_deploy status e7b5b39bbb1ebfe8012de88222c88b1fef4aa00a
  • Close the feature issue to indicate the feature will be released in the current milestone.
  • Clean up the feature flag from all environments by running these chatops command in #production channel:
    • /chatops run feature delete cluster_vulnerabilities --dev
    • /chatops run feature delete cluster_vulnerabilities --staging
    • /chatops run feature delete cluster_vulnerabilities
  • Close this rollout issue.

Rollback Steps

  • This feature can be disabled by running the following Chatops command:
/chatops run feature set cluster_vulnerabilities false
Edited by Alexander Turinske