Tag Archives: multi-site

GerritForge 2020 year in Review

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Dear Gerrit Code Review fellow,

It has been a challenging year, a strange year, for everyone. Most of us confined in our homes and working remotely, finding new ways of dealing with old problems.

Still, we believe the Gerrit Community as a whole has demonstrated an outstanding level of resilience in the face of exceptional difficulties. As far as we are concerned, we have seen no lesser activity, interest, new projects, compared to the previous years. For this, we are thankful to the community we are so strongly proud of being a part of.

In sharing our most sincere vows for happy festivities and a fruitful new year, we wanted to take the opportunity to share with you some of the achievements that made this 2020 worth getting through.

Top-Ten achievements in 2020

1. GerritForge has confirmed to be the world’s largest non-Google contributor to the Gerrit Code Review project.

GerritForge contributed almost a thousand changes merged, over 47 different components in the past 12 months. That is an outstanding achievement confirming the commitment and dedication of the company to the Gerrit Code Review platform and community.

2. Improved Gerrit DevOps Analytics with the ability to process Changes hashtags

The Gerrit DevOps Analytics platform continued to expand its possibilities, with the full support of the parsing of the NoteDb changes and the extractions of precious meta-data, such as the changes hashtags.

3. Driven two major releases of Gerrit Code Review

GerritForge helped driving the release of two major Gerrit Code Review version: Gerrit v3.2 – 1st June and with Ericsson making the Gerrit v3.3 – 1st December. GerritForge is also providing the CI/CD pipeline for the build and validation of the releases and helped the migration to Java 11.

4. Released major security fixes for the whole Gerrit Community, of all Gerrit versions dating back to v2.14

GerritForge coordinated together with Ericsson the release of critical security fixes across 6 different versions of the Gerrit Code Review platform, showing a continued commitment to a secure and scalable adoption of Gerrit in the enterprise.

5. Brand-new Gerrit module cache-chroniclemap, a new high-performance persistent cache in Gerrit v3.3

GerritForge continued its efforts in improving Gerrit’s scalability and performance with the development of a brand-new persistent cache backend powered by ChronicleMap, showing unprecedented low latency and performance on Gerrit v3.3.

6. Introduced the world-first official Open-Source AWS-based Gerrit Code Review Deployment

In a year of remote working and flexible environments, GerritForge provided its contribution to the whole community to help adopting Gerrit in the cloud. The aws-gerrit project is a brand-new production-ready AWS deployment now available for everyone and fully Open-Source. The new project is based on the GitOps best-practices and has been successfully adopted for the testing and validation of Gerrit v3.3.

7. New read-write scalability for Gerrit in High-Availability

GerritForge’s mission to scalability and high-availability (HA) plugin continued with the ability to scale horizontally with multiple R/W Gerrit Servers behind the same load balancer.

8. Improved reliability and flexibility of Gerrit Multi-Site

The Gerrit Multi-Site (MS) plugin has received exciting improvements with the support for geographically distributed R/W Gerrit servers across the globe.

9. Brand-new pull-replication plugin for improving latency and performance of large mono-repos replication.

The need to have Gerrit multi-site brought the request to have faster replication, especially for large mono-repos. GerritForge introduced a new pull-replication plugin project that, used in conjunction with Git Protocol v2, assure top-notch performance in replicating repositories with large number of refs.

10. Helped large-scale OpenSource Community migrating to Gerrit v3

The Eclipse Foundation and the OpenDev platform (by OpenStack), upgraded to the latest version of Gerrit Code Review, thanks to the continuous help and support from GerritForge and the rest of the Gerrit Code Review community.

All the best, Stay Safe, and we will shake hands again soon!

The GerritForge Team

Happy New Year, Gerrit Code Review

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It has been a hectic and productive year for ourselves at GerritForge and the Gerrit Code Review Community.
We want to take this opportunity to recap some of the milestones of the 2019 and the exciting perspectives for 2020 and beyond.

Gerrit Code Review, 2019 in numbers

gerrit-2019-commits.png

Gerrit had over 120+ contributors from all around the world coming from 33 different companies and organisations, which is excellent. There is a robust 6% increase in the number of commits (+231 commits) but a reduction in the number of contributors (-7 authors).

With regards to the overall trend of commits during the year, the success of the Gerrit User Summit 2019 in Sunnyvale is visible, with an increase of the rate of commits around October/November.

Top-three projects of the 2019

  1. Gerrit (1,626 commits) is, of course, the most active project. However, it is visibly down in terms of number of commits from 2018 (-19%). That is a consequence of the shift of focus to the other two key components listed below, which are available as plugins and then not accounted for the overall gerrit core repository statistics.
  2. Checks (315 commits) is the brand-new 1st class CI integration API for external build systems, such as Jenkins and Zuul. It is incredible how in just 12 months it has become robust and fully mature. It is currently used for the validation of all changes on the Gerrit project.
  3. Multi-site (234 commits) is the long-awaited support for Gerrit that everyone has been waiting for years. It is finally available for all active and supported versions (from 2.16+ onwards).

Top-three companies contributing to Gerrit

gerrit-contributors-2019.png

  1. Google is, with no surprise, still the top contributor of the Gerrit project overall. It is basically stable from 2018 (around 43%) as a confirmation of the continued commitment to the project.
  2. GerritForge is growing significantly in the contribution to the project, with exactly half of the contributions of Google. This is a significant result from 2018 with a 7% growth of involvement.
  3. CollabNet is sliding to the 3rd position (it was 2nd in 2018) with a 3% decrease of contributions. As noticeable mention, however, David Pursehouse from CollabNet is still the number #1 maintainer in terms of number of commits.

Even if it is outside the top#3 contributors companies, SAP deserves a special mention for its continuous involvement in the JGit project, which is at the basis of Gerrit engine, and its fantastic engagement in improving the Gerrit CI system and integrating it with the checks plugin.

Top-three achievements from GerritForge

The outstanding results of contributions of GerritForge in 2019 have been focused on three major topics.

Gerrit multi-site, released and production ready

We released the Gerrit Multi-Site plugin, allowing seamless balancing in a distributed environment, a technologically highly advanced development, crucial for very distributed companies. See https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/multi-site for more information.

Gerrit User Summits in Europe, USA and streaming

We successfully organised and executed the Gerrit User Group in Europe and the US. The event was very well received by the community with an overall attendance of some 87 on-site and 38 in streaming. Have a look at https://gitenterprise.me/2019/12/23/gerrit-user-summit-survey/ for interesting feedback on those from the attendees.
We opened our own local office in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley. A crucial move to better serve our ever-expanding US customer base.

Gerrit Analytics for the Android Open-Source Project

We kickstarted the Gerrit Analytics for the Android open-source project initiative: after the successful adoption of the automatic collection of code metrics on the Gerrit project (see https://analytics.gerrithub.io) the Android team asked GerritForge to start working on extracting the same metrics from their code.

What’s coming in 2020

Gerrit v3.2 is currently under development and it is planned to be released around April/May 2020. It represents a major milestone for the Gerrit project with the support for Java 11 and large JVM heaps, up to hundreds of GBytes. Gerrit v3.2 is definitely the release that everyone that has a big repository (mono-repos) should target as next upgrade. See the Gerrit .roadmap at https://www.gerritcodereview.com/roadmap.html for more details about the planned features.

More work and improvements on the checks plugin, with the aim of fully integrating it into everyone’s user-journey and their CI/CD pipeline. Our first blog-post of 2020 will be how to use Jenkins and Checks plugin together with GerritHub.io.

Multi-site and HA will become more integrated with Gerrit, with the aim of moving parts of their technologies (e.g. global ref-db) into JGit and thus used in Gerrit core.

The Gerrit User Summit 2020 will continue the experiment of cross-pollination with other communities, after the success of the interactions with the JGit and OpenStack communities in 2019. Bazel is the next target, as it is used as the de-facto standard build system for Gerrit and its plugins.

 

Again, Best wishes from your friends at GerritForge and looking forward to a continuing successful partnership in the coming years.

Luca Milanesio
Gerrit Maintainer, Release Manager and member of the ESC.