NFS Support Deprecation on November 22, 2022
Slack Channel for Discussion: #nfs-deprecation-coms
Update - April 14, 2022
We have received approval to not consider this support update a breaking change by leadership. As such, we are recommending moving this deprecation of support to November 22, 2022 and referencing it by date instead of release. This clarifies that this is not a code change nor tied to a release, but is instead a change in support tied to a specific date. The schedule below is being updated to this new timeframe.
Deprecation Summary
As the %15.0 release is approaching, it is crucial that we provide adequate messaging and warning to our user base around the deprecation of NFS support. This is a difficult subject for many of our customers, so we want to ensure open and honest collaboration by both our customer facing teams and our product / engineering teams.
Breaking Change
This change does not introduce a software breaking change, however it will be a support change as discussed below. In that sense, this does qualify as a breaking change as current customers will lose support for NFS beginning in %15.0.
Affected Topology
This change only impacts Self-Managed users who are using the NFS filesystem currently.
Affected Tier
This impacts all self-managed users who are utilizing NFS who obtain support through GitLab.
History
With the announcement of Gitaly Cluster in %13.0, we communicated our desire to deprecate support for NFS in %14.0. When work was begun to formally deprecate NFS for repository storage in %14.0, many concerns were raised. For a full history, please see the retrospective issue which contains links and discussions.
Documented Position
- Currently documented plan is available in the documentation - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/nfs.html#gitaly-and-nfs-deprecation
- Currently documented as out of support (second row of table) - https://about.gitlab.com/support/statement-of-support.html#gitlab-self-managed-customers
Product & Engineering Position
This section is a work in progress and will continue to be updated as the Gitaly team has had a full chance to weigh in on potential impacts.
The desire to deprecate NFS comes primarily from the Support team as customers have had numerous issues with repository storage on NFS. This creates a sub-optimal experience for users, and requires non-trivial support resources and engineering resources to achieve resolution. We have therefore worked hard to craft a plan that allows our customers the time to transition.
Our currently documented plan of record is to stop providing engineering updates, bug fixes, and support as of the release of %15.0.