Run post-deployment pipelines around pull-based deployments

Release notes

GitLab CI/CD pipelines are a core value offering for the majority of our customers. At the same time, the GitOps workflow of the agent for Kubernetes did not integrate with the pipelines. This release allows our users to define pipelines to run after a successful or failed pull-based deployment.

Problem to solve

As a Platform engineer, I want to auto-start E2E tests after the pull-based deployments are finished successfully.

As a Platform engineer, I want to start a remediation pipeline, if a pull-based deployment failed.

Proposal

Without CRDs

This proposal was created before we decided to move to Flux

Once gitops sync is done, agentk can send an event (via kas) to GitLab. It's then up to GitLab to act on that (via &8349 or #355658). Open questions here are:

• agentk syncs manifests every 5 minutes. Do we send an event each time? Deduplication? What if agentk restarts and syncs again - how to deduplicate that?

With CRDs - TBD

• Build on top of Flux's generic with HMAC notification provider
• Create an event listener in agentk that accepts notifications coming from Flux
  • the event listener checks the GitRepository behind the event (the event might come from a Kustomization) to find out its source in GitLab
• Make agentk to trigger outstanding jobs on the last pipeline related to the commit in the Flux event using the Jobs API
• The job name is provided in a CR consumed by agentk
• The agent needs to be authorized to trigger jobs in the given project. Could we use ci_access for this?

Proposed CR format:

apiVersion: pipelines.gitlab.com/v1
kind: JobTrigger
metadata:
  name: my-trigger
spec:
  source:
    project: gitlab-org/gitlab
    branch: main
    secretRef:
      name: my-gitlab-project-token
  on_success:
    job_name: qa-tests
    variables:
      HELLO: "világ"
  on_failure:
    job_name: revert
    variables:
      BYE: "világ"

Intended users

• Delaney (Development Team Lead)
• Priyanka (Platform Engineer)
• Rachel (Release Manager)

Feature Usage Metrics

• number of jobs triggered

Related

• https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/3387
• Flux Notification GitHub provider triggering GitHub actions

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