Dimensional Data

GitLab’s Distribution Engineering team has been hard at work getting Amazon Linux 2 distro-specific packages ready in preparation for GitLab’s official support of Amazon Linux 2. Starting with Version 15.0 of GitLab, Amazon Linux 2 is a supported distro and packages are available for both x86 and Graviton ARM architectures. Safely moving forward to Amazon Linux 2 packages from EL7 While Amazon Linux 2 has not been officially supported before 15.0, as a convenience to customers who wanted to use yum and RPM packages to install the EL7 packages, GitLab configured a workaround in our packaging services to direct Amazon Linux 2 yum requests to the EL7 packages. If you’ve been using GitLab’s yum repo registration script, you many not know that you were using EL7 packages and not distro-specific packages. This workaround will be deprecated and requests from Amazon Linux 2 will get the distro-specific packages with the release of GitLab 15.3.0 on August 22, 2022. As a convenience for those of you who have automation that depends directly on this workaround, we wanted to provide you with information on how to do early testing as well as how to peg your automation to the EL 7 packages until you are able to properly integrate the changes into your automation. GitLab documentation demonstrates how to call our managed yum repository setup scripts by downloading the latest copy and running it directly in the instructions for installing instances and the instructions for installing runners. Any organization using GitLab’s EL 7 packages for Amazon Linux 2 will want to test with – and update to – the distro-specific packages as soon as possible as GitLab will only be testing Amazon Linux 2 with the Amazon Linux 2 specific packages going forward. We also understand that the timing of the testing and migration to these packages must be done in a coordinated cutover so that the package type does not change in your existing stacks without you having made any changes. This can be more important if a GitLab stack has undergone platform qualification for compliance purposes. Amazon Linux 2 specific packages are only available for GitLab 14.9.0 and later. If your automation depends directly on GitLab’s repo configuration script and it is still pegged to a GitLab version prior to 14.9.0 when this change becomes GA, then action must be taken to prevent breaking that automation. We have devised an idempotent two-line script solution that you can put in place now to prevent disruption if you are still on a pre-14.9.0 version at the time the new behavior of script.rpm.sh becomes GA on August 22, 2022 with the release of GitLab 15.3.0. GitLab rake-based backup and restore will continue to work seamlessly across the distro-specific package changes if you have to restore to your Amazon Linux 2 built stack from an EL7 backup. If you are using third-party backup, you may wish to trigger a new backup immediately after transitioning to the new distro packages to avoid the scenario altogether. Amazon Linux 2 packages for building GitLab instances before 15.3.0 The following code inserts two lines of code between those originally outlined in the instructions for installing using RPM packages. The first one (starts with sed) splices in the Amazon Linux 2 yum repo endpoint edits into the repository configuration file […]