Gerrit User Summit at Google Mountain View – CA

Exciting times this year at the Gerrit User Summit and Hackathon 2015: the major contributors and players of the Gerrit community shared experiencing, opinions and news in an intense 7-days event in Google – Mountain View – CA.

The User Summit

The first two days have seen the User Summit at the centre of the stage: scalability, scalability and scalability have been the Leitmotif of the discussion.
GerritHub.io started the saga with the astonishing numbers of the two years growth:

• 6.5K users (+580%)
• 41K changes (+1700%)
• 16K projects (+530%)
• 500GBytes (+500%)

The two years of live production experience with users coming from GitHub have highlighted problems (replication, repositories sharding, multi-master) and possible solutions, ranging from Gerrit Virtual Private Hosting to the on-premises deployment integrated with BitBucket and GitHub:Enterprise.
Ericsson continued with a very detailed description of how Gerrit is used as “Enterprise Washing Machine” of all code that goes through the development pipeline: scalability and control are the fundamental keywords that were repeatedly mentioned and enforced.
The replication across sites have been massively improved regarding performance and stability since the introduction of Git/HTTPS as the main protocol for replication, as previously advised by GerritForge in 2014.
The first day ended with Google smashing out everyone his hypersonic numbers:

• 1.6M changes / 3.8M patch-sets
• 240 Gerrit virtual nodes
• 2.5M repositories

The second day was all projected on the future of Gerrit, with three very interesting features coming soon.

Gerrit 3.0 and NoteDB

Dave Borowitz presented the status of the replacement of Gerrit DBMS
with a 100% open standard solution based on commit notes, implemented by all OpenSource and Commercial “flavours” of Git. The solution will allow interoperability with other code-review implementations (e.g. Phabricator) and fully enable reviews replication and off-line operations.
The new DBMS-free version of Gerrit will be called the Ver. 3.0 and it will be the next version after current Gerrit master (Ver. 2.13) gets released. released.

Gerrit PluginManager: one plugin to rule them all

Luca Milanesio presented a new vision on how to discover and install plugins on the Gerrit platform: Gerrit PluginManager. We should not bundle more and more plugins with Gerrit, which eventually would lead to an explosion of the WAR file-size. You can now install only a “plugin-manager” which then guide you through the “one-click” set-up of all the others.
Differently from similar solutions such as Jenkins Update Centre, the Gerrit PluginManager is based on the live status of the plugins and their compatibility with Gerrit: as soon as one plugin gets patched and successfully compiled with a version of Gerrit, it will automatically be listed and made available by the PluginManager. Additionally GerritForge will provide a list of certified and guaranteed plugins that have been successfully tested with Gerrit.

PolyGerrit, the new web-component UX for Gerrit.

Andrew Bonventre is the Googler that is driving the transformation of Gerrit UX to the new Polymer platform, however for personal reasons he was not able to attend the Summit. Dave Borowitz replaced him and unveiled that will be the (very) near future of Gerrit UX: no more GWT and complex and black magic transforming Java in obscure JavaScript, the future is coming through web-components, a new emerging and promising standard for the HTML and modern web-browsers.
Despite the UX being at very early stages, Dave was able to showcase a fully functional list of changes and search box powered by Polymer and calling Gerrit REST-API, really fast and promising!

Gertty, the text-only Gerrit Code Review.

On the complete opposite side, why not using Gerrit from an 80×25 text-only console? Gertty is an astonishing 100% char-based console, all based on Gerrit REST-Api and a local SqLite local DB for caching changes. Allows complete off-line operations and synchronisation with Gerrit changes. Productive and effective while you are on the go.

CollabNet and Gerrit tuning cheat-sheet

CollabNet presented a useful four pages brochure to guide through the tuning of a Gerrit set-up for a small, medium or large installation. Based on their experience of running TeamForge SCM, the commercial fork of Gerrit Code Review based on their existing TeamForge ALM proprietary solution, they have been able to experiment the Gerrit default settings and learn how to adjust them to leverage the full power of your setup.
The audience appreciated the effort and encouraged CollabNet to post all the findings as Gerrit reviews to get the code-base better and improve the default settings of the set-up.

Gerrit and Jenkins Workflow dance together with Docker.

Cloudbees presented a very effective demo on how to use Gerrit and Jenkins Workflow plugin to implement a real-life Continuous Delivery Pipeline. The presentation leveraged the use of Docker images as previously presented by Stefano Galarraga in his “Gerrit and Jenkins Continuous Delivery Pipeline for BigData” talk. They both explained and showed how Code Review is key in implementing a successful and smooth code validation and roll-out. Stefano’s presentation made use of the new exciting feature of “topic submission” that enables the grouping and commit of multiple changes across repositories.

The Hackathon, topics and improvements.

A lot of code have been pushed during the hackathon:

• 400 changes merged
• 3 Gerrit version released

Gerrit metrics

Surely the hot-topic of the hackathon has been the introduction of a new pluggable metrics engine in Gerrit, currently half-merged in master branch. Gustaf demoed on how now is possible to use standard tools such as Graphite and JMX console to extract, display and graph the most relevant Gerrit metrics in real-time. This is similar to what the JavaMelody plugin was providing, with the added value of getting the data outside the Gerrit JVM and analyse with greater detail and a standard monitoring platform.

PolyGerrit

Gerrit master has been officially upgraded to allow the development of the new Polymer-based UX for Gerrit, code-named “PolyGerrit”. Gerrit master will need from now on the installation of NodeJS during development. This is needed for building and packaging the “vulcanised” version of Gerrit UX which contains the basic components of the user interface. At the moment the only thing that will be visible is the demo of list of changes presented by Dave Borowitz at the User Summit, however new changes are coming over and Google announced that they are targeting Q4-2015 for a first internal release of the new UX.

GerritForge CI Verifier

As Gerrit 3.0 will be completely revamped in terms of reviews persistence, the community pushed for having a stricter changes validation on both the old DBMS and new NoteDB based persistence. GerritForge extended the use of the CI system (https://gerrit-ci.gerritforge.com) to cover the validation of every change / patch-set that will be uploaded to Gerrit from now on. This is a substantial improvement on the Code Review workflow of Gerrit itself and will hopefully contribute to a stable and solid Ver. 3.0 release next year.

Externalisation of Gerrit Hooks and Events to plugins

Qualcomm worked at completing the externalisation of Gerrit hooks and stream events into plugins. This change will allow to plug different events providers depending on the type of Gerrit set-up, single node or multi-master. One more important step towards an OpenSource implementation of Gerrit Multi-Master.