Build a staging environment for developers only
On Azure.
This should have the following:
-
2 worker nodes -
1 Database server (that can be a bit smaller that the one we have) -
1 small NFS/Ceph server/cluster (we could use the one that is in dev.gitlab.org) -
A restore of the database backup (consider restoring every weekend automatically, so we also test database backup restore) -
The git data of gitlab-com and gitlab-org in the storage up to date with the database restore -
performance metrics wired to it so we can track progress and behaviour -
Some way to deploy in this environment that is easy for developers - I can take the idea of having only release managers doing it.