1. 0
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 0
Cloud-native Gerrit
Luca Milanesio
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer

2. 1
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 1
About GerritForge
Founded in
the UK
HQ in London with
presence in Europe and
the USA (GerritForge Inc.)
Committed to
OpenSource
and to Gerrit
Code Review
since 2009

3. 2
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 2
GerritForge’s mission
Our 2021 goal is:
Cloud-native Gerrit

4. 3
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 3
Cloud-native: agenda
• What cloud-native means
• Roadmap to cloud-native Gerrit
• Benefits
• Risks
• Pitfalls
• Demo
• Are you going cloud-native?
• Q&A

5. 4
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 4
Cloud-native: what is that?
Cloud native computing is an approach in software
development that utilizes cloud computing to "build and run
scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments
such as public, private, and hybrid clouds". Technologies
such as containers, microservices, serverless functions
and immutable infrastructure, deployed via declarative
code are common elements of this architectural style.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_native_computing

6. 5
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 5
Cloud-native: is that good or bad for Gerrit?
Scalability
Elasticity
Geo-distribution
CDN
Low-latency
Disposable Infra
Easier B2B
No physical infra
Lack of CPU / Mem
Limited throughput
Host instability
Storage is expensive

7. 6
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 6
Gerrit Code Review the road to the cloud

8. 7
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 7
Stage-0 : componentization
2015

9. 8
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 8
Stage-1 : HA and zero-downtime
2016

10. 9
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 9
Stage-2 : Gerrit on NoteDb
2018

11. 10
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 10
Stage-3 : K8s-Gerrit w/ Gardener (by SAP)
2018

12. 11
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 11
Stage-4 : Gerrit multi-site
2019

13. 12
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 12
Stage-5 : AWS-Gerrit – immutable and scalable
2020

14. 13
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 13
Gerrit Events
Stage-6 : Gerrit goes with Serverless integrations
2021
Global ref-db
DNS and load
balancing
Observability & Alerts

15. 14
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 14
Cloud-native Gerrit : benefits
Business focus
1. Common solutions to common problems
DNS Geolocation policies, Load-balancing, Logs collection,
Alerts and Monitoring, Elastic scalability
2. Skills availability
AWS and Google Cloud knowledge is widespread
3. Company and industry standards
X.509 and DNS management, Security and Hardening

16. 15
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 15
Cloud-native Gerrit : risks

17. 16
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 16
Cloud-native Gerrit : risks
Some of the recent Cloud and CDN failures
8 Jun 2021
1 Apr 2021
25 Nov 2020
14 Dec 2020

18. 17
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 17
Cloud-native Gerrit : risks
Losing control
1. Understand the technologies you use
Team upskill, read logs, troubleshoot common problems
2. Multi-cloud
Put a DR site on a different cloud, prevent global disaster
3. Allow fallbacks
Design for soft-failures and fallbacks of any dependent service

19. 18
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 18
Cloud-native Gerrit : pitfalls
1. Cloud is NOT necessarily cheaper than on-prem infrastructure
(see https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/)
2. Do not oversize the instance types
Better having *more* smaller and cheaper instances
3. Optimize cache vs. I/O throughput
Memory is way cheaper than disk throughput in the Cloud
(see EFS pricing at https://aws.amazon.com/efs/pricing/)
4. Use more than one availability zone, *always*
Entire availability zones *may* and *do fail*
5. Ban Git/SSH, Gerrit SSH commands, SSH/stream-events
SSH is stateful, difficult to trace, redirect, scale-up: *DO NOT USE IT*
6. Use auto-scaling for Gerrit read-only replicas

20. 19
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 19
Real-life cloud-native Gerrit multi-site / AWS
Gerrit daemon
events-broker
libModule
global-refdb
libModule
replication
plugin
pull-replication
plugin
dynamodb-refdb
plugin
events-kinesis
plugin
websession-broker
plugin
Metrics-reporter-cloudwatch
plugin
healthcheck
plugin

21. 20
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 20
Real-life cloud-native Gerrit multi-site / AWS
DEMO

22. 21
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 21
Gerrit multi-site with GCloud Pub/Sub events
DEMO

23. 22
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 22
Q&A: are you planning to go cloud-native?
Image from: http://cypp.rutgers.edu/ru-voting/political-information/public-opinion-polls/

24. 23
Virtual Gerrit Contributors Summit 2021 – On-line GerritForge.com 23
Wants to know more?
GerritForge.com/contact