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legacy_artifacts_ui_removal.md

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Legacy Artifacts UI Removal
Status Proposed, Accepted, Implemented, Obsolete
RFC # 111
Author(s) Maggie Neterval (@maggieneterval)
SIG / WG UI/UX SIG
Obsoletes spinnaker/spinnaker/4777

Overview

Spinnaker currently supports two artifact configuration experiences: the legacy UI and a feature-flagged "rewrite" UI. This RFC outlines a plan to test the new UI, make it the default artifact configuration experience, and remove the legacy UI.

Vocabulary

The rest of this RFC will refer to the two UIs as the legacy UI and the new UI:

  • Legacy UI: Enabled by setting Deck's artifacts feature flag to true. Disabled by default. The documentation currently refers to this UI as the "standard UI", but it has also been referred to as the "pre-rewrite UI."

  • New UI: Enabled by setting Deck's artifactsRewrite feature flag to true. Disabled by default. The documentation currently refers to this UI as the "new UI," but it has also been referred to as the "artifacts rewrite UI."

Goals

The goal of this RFC is to propose a plan to:

  • Test the new UI.
  • Resolve all bugs reported by users or discovered while testing the new UI.
  • Enable the new UI by default.
  • Communicate the new default to users.
  • Remove the old UI.

Non-Goals

  • Compare the implementation details of the legacy and new UIs.
  • Gather user feedback about the new UI in order to further improve it: while this might be worthwhile, the scope of this RFC is limited to auditing the new UI as-is to ensure that it is backwards-compatible with the legacy UI.

Motivation and Rationale

  • Pivotal wrote this design document for improving the artifact configuration experience, and released an initial implementation behind a feature flag in Spinnaker 1.13 (March 2019). However, the design document did not include a plan for identifying validating users, exposing the new UI by default, or removing support for the legacy UI.
  • Pivotal originally intended to default the new UI to enabled in Spinnaker 1.16, but Pivotal is no longer working on Spinnaker.
  • Supporting two artifacts-related feature flags has increased the complexity of the artifacts configuration experience, which was already confusing for end users, as evidenced by many conversations in Slack, GitHub issues, and the Kubernetes SIG. There have also been a number of bugs reported in relation to the new UI, but no comprehensive audit of the new UI by Spinnaker maintainers.

Timeline

Each set of milestones should be complete by the time the corresponding Spinnaker or Halyard version is released.

Spinnaker Version Release Window Opens Milestones
1.20 2020-04-27 New UI is enabled by default. Legacy UI is behind a feature flag.
1.21 2020-06-22 Legacy UI is removed.
1.23 TBD Legacy UI documentation is removed.
Halyard Version Supported Spinnaker Versions Milestones
1.35 1.17, 1.18. 1.19 Log warning that --artifacts and --artifacts-rewrite feature flags are no longer used in Spinnaker >= 1.20.
TBD 1.20, 1.21, 1.22 Remove --artifacts and --artifacts-rewrite feature flags, as no supported release consumes them.

Design

  • Create a GitHub project to organize existing user-reported issues related to the new UI.

  • Manually test the new UI. For each type of artifact and artifact-driven workflow, test that pipelines configured with the legacy UI still work with the new UI, and that pipelines configured with the new UI work as expected. This includes artifacts configured in the pipeline configuration's Expected Artifacts section, artifacts configured as expected artifacts inline in stages, and artifacts configured in Produces Artifacts sections of stages. (Huge thank you to ezimanyi@ for helping with this.)

  • Document and resolve all bugs discovered while manually testing the new UI (deck/pull/8179, deck/pull/8160, deck/pull/8165, deck/pull/8121, deck/pull/8111, deck/pull/8096, deck/pull/8071, orca/pull/3562).

  • For release 1.20, remove the artifacts and artifactsRewrite feature flags from Deck (deck/pull/8184). The default UI will be the new UI, previously gated by the artifactsRewrite flag. Users can revert to the legacy UI by enabling a new temporary feature flag, legacyArtifactsEnabled. We will not expose this flag in Halyard and require it be added manually to settings-local.js. Communicate this change by adding the @ValidForSpinnakerVersion annotation to the artifacts and artifactsRewrite feature flags in Halyard with an appropriate upperBound and tooHighMessage, updating the artifacts documentation, and adding a section to the 1.20 release notes (halyard/pull/1620, spinnaker.github.io/pull/1806).

  • For release 1.21, remove the legacyArtifactsEnabled flag and all legacy UI code (deck/pull/8273). Communicate this change by adding a section to the 1.21 release notes.

  • After release 1.23, we can remove the legacy UI documentation, as no supported release (1.21, 1.22, 1.23) will include the legacy UI. Create a self-assigned issue to track this (spinnaker/spinnaker/5756).

  • After release 1.22, we can remove Halyard's --artifacts and --artifacts-rewrite feature flags because no supported release (1.20, 1.21, 1.22) will read from these flags. Create a self-assigned issue to track this (spinnaker/spinnaker/5757).

Prior Art and Alternatives

Instead of removing the legacy UI, we could do one of the following:

  1. Continue to support both UIs. However, this increases the maintenance burden for Spinnaker developers and adds complexity for end-users.
  2. Remove the new UI. However, initial feedback from users indicates that the new UI is easier to use than the legacy UI.

Instead of eventually removing all of Deck's artifacts feature flags in favor of a unified experience, we could preserve the ability to disable artifacts altogether. However, the only change in pipeline configuration experience for users who currently have artifacts disabled will be the addition of the optional Artifacts Constraints input to the Automated Triggers section. Since this is a minimally intrusive addition, the benefits of maintaining and documenting a single configuration experience likely outweigh this risk.

Known Unknowns and Risks

The new UI has not been exhaustively tested with all artifact types, so there are an unknown number of bugs to resolve before Spinnaker 1.20 is released and we default the new UI to enabled. If we cannot resolve all of the bugs we encounter while manually testing the new UI, we will delay defaulting the new UI to enabled to release 1.21 and update this RFC's timeline accordingly.