222 lines
9.8 KiB
Markdown
222 lines
9.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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stage: none
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group: unassigned
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comments: false
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description: 'Improve scalability of GitLab CI/CD'
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---
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# CI/CD Scaling
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## Summary
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GitLab CI/CD is one of the most data and compute intensive components of GitLab.
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Since its [initial release in November 2012](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2012/11/13/continuous-integration-server-from-gitlab/),
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the CI/CD subsystem has evolved significantly. It was [integrated into GitLab in September 2015](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2015/09/22/gitlab-8-0-released/)
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and has become [one of the most beloved CI/CD solutions](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/09/27/gitlab-leader-continuous-integration-forrester-wave/).
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GitLab CI/CD has come a long way since the initial release, but the design of
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the data storage for pipeline builds remains almost the same since 2012. We
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store all the builds in PostgreSQL in `ci_builds` table, and because we are
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creating more than [2 million builds each day on GitLab.com](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17ZdTWQMnTHWbyERlvj1GA7qhw_uIfCoI5Zfrrsh95zU),
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we are reaching database limits that are slowing our development velocity down.
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On February 1st, 2021, GitLab.com surpassed 1 billion CI/CD builds created and the number of
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builds continues to grow exponentially.
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## Goals
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**Enable future growth by making processing 20M builds in a day possible.**
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## Challenges
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The current state of CI/CD product architecture needs to be updated if we want
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to sustain future growth.
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### We are running out of the capacity to store primary keys
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The primary key in `ci_builds` table is an integer generated in a sequence.
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Historically, Rails used to use [integer](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/14/datatype-numeric.html)
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type when creating primary keys for a table. We did use the default when we
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[created the `ci_builds` table in 2012](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/046b28312704f3131e72dcd2dbdacc5264d4aa62/db/ci/migrate/20121004165038_create_builds.rb).
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[The behavior of Rails has changed](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/26266)
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since the release of Rails 5. The framework is now using `bigint` type that is 8
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bytes long, however we have not migrated primary keys for `ci_builds` table to
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`bigint` yet.
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We will run out of the capacity of the integer type to store primary keys in
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`ci_builds` table before December 2021. When it happens without a viable
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workaround or an emergency plan, GitLab.com will go down.
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`ci_builds` is just one of the tables that are running out of the primary keys
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available in Int4 sequence. There are multiple other tables storing CI/CD data
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that have the same problem.
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Primary keys problem will be tackled by our Database Team.
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**Status**: In October 2021, the primary keys in CI tables were migrated
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to big integers. See the [related Epic](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5657) for more details.
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### The table is too large
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There is more than a billion rows in `ci_builds` table. We store more than 2
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terabytes of data in that table, and the total size of indexes is more than 1
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terabyte (as of February 2021).
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This amount of data contributes to a significant performance problems we
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experience on our primary PostgreSQL database.
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Most of the problem are related to how PostgreSQL database works internally,
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and how it is making use of resources on a node the database runs on. We are at
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the limits of vertical scaling of the primary database nodes and we frequently
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see a negative impact of the `ci_builds` table on the overall performance,
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stability, scalability and predictability of the database GitLab.com depends
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on.
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The size of the table also hinders development velocity because queries that
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seem fine in the development environment may not work on GitLab.com. The
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difference in the dataset size between the environments makes it difficult to
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predict the performance of even the most simple queries.
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Team members and the wider community members are struggling to contribute the
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Verify area, because we restricted the possibility of extending `ci_builds`
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even further. Our static analysis tools prevent adding more columns to this
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table. Adding new queries is unpredictable because of the size of the dataset
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and the amount of queries executed using the table. This significantly hinders
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the development velocity and contributes to incidents on the production
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environment.
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We also expect a significant, exponential growth in the upcoming years.
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One of the forecasts done using [Facebook's
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Prophet](https://facebook.github.io/prophet/) shows that in the first half of
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2024 we expect seeing 20M builds created on GitLab.com each day. In comparison
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to around 2M we see created today, this is 10x growth our product might need to
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sustain in upcoming years.
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**Status**: As of October 2021 we reduced the growth rate of `ci_builds` table
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by writing build options and variables to `ci_builds_metadata` table. We plan
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to ship further improvements that will be described in a separate blueprint.
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### Queuing mechanisms are using the large table
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Because of how large the table is, mechanisms that we use to build queues of
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pending builds (there is more than one queue), are not very efficient. Pending
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builds represent a small fraction of what we store in the `ci_builds` table,
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yet we need to find them in this big dataset to determine an order in which we
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want to process them.
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This mechanism is very inefficient, and it has been causing problems on the
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production environment frequently. This usually results in a significant drop
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of the CI/CD Apdex score, and sometimes even causes a significant performance
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degradation in the production environment.
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There are multiple other strategies that can improve performance and
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reliability. We can use [Redis
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queuing](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/322972), or [a separate
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table that will accelerate SQL queries used to build
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queues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/322766) and we want to
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explore them.
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**Status**: As of October 2021 the new architecture [has been implemented on
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GitLab.com](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5909#note_680407908).
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The following epic tracks making it generally available: [Make the new pending
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builds architecture generally available](
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https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6954).
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### Moving big amounts of data is challenging
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We store a significant amount of data in `ci_builds` table. Some of the columns
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in that table store a serialized user-provided data. Column `ci_builds.options`
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stores more than 600 gigabytes of data, and `ci_builds.yaml_variables` more
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than 300 gigabytes (as of February 2021).
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It is a lot of data that needs to be reliably moved to a different place.
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Unfortunately, right now, our [background
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migrations](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/background_migrations.html)
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are not reliable enough to migrate this amount of data at scale. We need to
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build mechanisms that will give us confidence in moving this data between
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columns, tables, partitions or database shards.
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Effort to improve background migrations will be owned by our Database Team.
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**Status**: In progress. We plan to ship further improvements that will be
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described in a separate architectural blueprint.
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## Proposal
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Making GitLab CI/CD product ready for the scale we expect to see in the
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upcoming years is a multi-phase effort.
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First, we want to focus on things that are urgently needed right now. We need
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to fix primary keys overflow risk and unblock other teams that are working on
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database partitioning and sharding.
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We want to improve known bottlenecks, like
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builds queuing mechanisms that is using the large table, and other things that
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are holding other teams back.
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Extending CI/CD metrics is important to get a better sense of how the system
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performs and to what growth should we expect. This will make it easier for us
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to identify bottlenecks and perform more advanced capacity planning.
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Next step is to better understand how we can leverage strong time-decay
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characteristic of CI/CD data. This might help us to partition CI/CD dataset to
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reduce the size of CI/CD database tables.
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## Iterations
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Work required to achieve our next CI/CD scaling target is tracked in the
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[CI/CD Scaling](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5745) epic.
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1. ✓ Migrate primary keys to big integers on GitLab.com.
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1. ✓ Implement the new architecture of builds queuing on GitLab.com.
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1. [Make the new builds queuing architecture generally available](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6954).
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1. [Partition CI/CD data using time-decay pattern](../ci_data_decay/).
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## Status
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|-------------|--------------|
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| Created at | 21.01.2021 |
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| Approved at | 26.04.2021 |
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| Updated at | 28.02.2022 |
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Status: In progress.
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## Who
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Proposal:
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<!-- vale gitlab.Spelling = NO -->
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| Role | Who
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|------------------------------|-------------------------|
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| Author | Grzegorz Bizon |
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| Architecture Evolution Coach | Kamil Trzciński |
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| Engineering Leader | Cheryl Li |
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| Product Manager | Jackie Porter |
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| Domain Expert / Verify | Fabio Pitino |
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| Domain Expert / Database | Jose Finotto |
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| Domain Expert / PostgreSQL | Nikolay Samokhvalov |
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DRIs:
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| Role | Who
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|------------------------------|------------------------|
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| Leadership | Cheryl Li |
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| Product | Jackie Porter |
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| Engineering | Grzegorz Bizon |
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Domain experts:
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| Area | Who
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|------------------------------|------------------------|
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| Domain Expert / Verify | Fabio Pitino |
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| Domain Expert / Verify | Marius Bobin |
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| Domain Expert / Database | Jose Finotto |
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| Domain Expert / PostgreSQL | Nikolay Samokhvalov |
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<!-- vale gitlab.Spelling = YES -->
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