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+---
+stage: none
+group: unassigned
+comments: false
+description: 'Improve scalability of GitLab CI/CD'
+---
+
+# Next CI/CD scale target: 20M builds per day by 2024
+
+## Summary
+
+GitLab CI/CD is one of the most data and compute intensive components of GitLab.
+Since its [initial release in November 2012](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2012/11/13/continuous-integration-server-from-gitlab/),
+the CI/CD subsystem has evolved significantly. It was [integrated into GitLab in September 2015](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2015/09/22/gitlab-8-0-released/)
+and has become [one of the most beloved CI/CD solutions](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/09/27/gitlab-leader-continuous-integration-forrester-wave/).
+
+GitLab CI/CD has come a long way since the initial release, but the design of
+the data storage for pipeline builds remains almost the same since 2012. We
+store all the builds in PostgreSQL in `ci_builds` table, and because we are
+creating more than [2 million builds each day on GitLab.com](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17ZdTWQMnTHWbyERlvj1GA7qhw_uIfCoI5Zfrrsh95zU),
+we are reaching database limits that are slowing our development velocity down.
+
+On February 1st, 2021, a billionth CI/CD job was created and the number of
+builds is growing exponentially. We will run out of the available primary keys
+for builds before December 2021 unless we improve the database model used to
+store CI/CD data.
+
+We expect to see 20M builds created daily on GitLab.com in the first half of
+2024.
+
+![ci_builds cumulative with forecast](ci_builds_cumulative_forecast.png)
+
+## Goals
+
+**Enable future growth by making processing 20M builds in a day possible.**
+
+## Challenges
+
+The current state of CI/CD product architecture needs to be updated if we want
+to sustain future growth.
+
+### We are running out of the capacity to store primary keys
+
+The primary key in `ci_builds` table is an integer generated in a sequence.
+Historically, Rails used to use [integer](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/datatype-numeric.html)
+type when creating primary keys for a table. We did use the default when we
+[created the `ci_builds` table in 2012](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/046b28312704f3131e72dcd2dbdacc5264d4aa62/db/ci/migrate/20121004165038_create_builds.rb).
+[The behavior of Rails has changed](https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/26266)
+since the release of Rails 5. The framework is now using bigint type that is 8
+bytes long, however we have not migrated primary keys for `ci_builds` table to
+bigint yet.
+
+We will run out of the capacity of the integer type to store primary keys in
+`ci_builds` table before December 2021. When it happens without a viable
+workaround or an emergency plan, GitLab.com will go down.
+
+`ci_builds` is just one of the tables that are running out of the primary keys
+available in Int4 sequence. There are multiple other tables storing CI/CD data
+that have the same problem.
+
+Primary keys problem will be tackled by our Database Team.
+
+### The table is too large
+
+There is more than a billion rows in `ci_builds` table. We store more than 2
+terabytes of data in that table, and the total size of indexes is more than 1
+terabyte (as of February 2021).
+
+This amount of data contributes to a significant performance problems we
+experience on our primary PostgreSQL database.
+
+Most of the problem are related to how PostgreSQL database works internally,
+and how it is making use of resources on a node the database runs on. We are at
+the limits of vertical scaling of the primary database nodes and we frequently
+see a negative impact of the `ci_builds` table on the overall performance,
+stability, scalability and predictability of the database GitLab.com depends
+on.
+
+The size of the table also hinders development velocity because queries that
+seem fine in the development environment may not work on GitLab.com. The
+difference in the dataset size between the environments makes it difficult to
+predict the performance of even the most simple queries.
+
+We also expect a significant, exponential growth in the upcoming years.
+
+One of the forecasts done using [Facebook's
+Prophet](https://facebook.github.io/prophet/) shows that in the first half of
+2024 we expect seeing 20M builds created on GitLab.com each day. In comparison
+to around 2M we see created today, this is 10x growth our product might need to
+sustain in upcoming years.
+
+![ci_builds daily forecast](ci_builds_daily_forecast.png)
+
+### Queuing mechanisms are using the large table
+
+Because of how large the table is, mechanisms that we use to build queues of
+pending builds (there is more than one queue), are not very efficient. Pending
+builds represent a small fraction of what we store in the `ci_builds` table,
+yet we need to find them in this big dataset to determine an order in which we
+want to process them.
+
+This mechanism is very inefficient, and it has been causing problems on the
+production environment frequently. This usually results in a significant drop
+of the CI/CD apdex score, and sometimes even causes a significant performance
+degradation in the production environment.
+
+There are multiple other strategies that can improve performance and
+reliability. We can use [Redis
+queuing](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/322972), or [a separate
+table that will accelerate SQL queries used to build
+queues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/322766) and we want to
+explore them.
+
+### Moving big amounts of data is challenging
+
+We store a significant amount of data in `ci_builds` table. Some of the columns
+in that table store a serialized user-provided data. Column `ci_builds.options`
+stores more than 600 gigabytes of data, and `ci_builds.yaml_variables` more
+than 300 gigabytes (as of February 2021).
+
+It is a lot of data that needs to be reliably moved to a different place.
+Unfortunately, right now, our [background
+migrations](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/background_migrations.html)
+are not reliable enough to migrate this amount of data at scale. We need to
+build mechanisms that will give us confidence in moving this data between
+columns, tables, partitions or database shards.
+
+Effort to improve background migrations will be owned by our Database Team.
+
+### Development velocity is negatively affected
+
+Team members and the wider community members are struggling to contribute the
+Verify area, because we restricted the possibility of extending `ci_builds`
+even further. Our static analysis tools prevent adding more columns to this
+table. Adding new queries is unpredictable because of the size of the dataset
+and the amount of queries executed using the table. This significantly hinders
+the development velocity and contributes to incidents on the production
+environment.
+
+## Proposal
+
+Making GitLab CI/CD product ready for the scale we expect to see in the
+upcoming years is a multi-phase effort.
+
+First, we want to focus on things that are urgently needed right now. We need
+to fix primary keys overflow risk and unblock other teams that are working on
+database partitioning and sharding.
+
+We want to improve situation around bottlenecks that are known already, like
+queuing mechanisms using the large table and things that are holding other
+teams back.
+
+Extending CI/CD metrics is important to get a better sense of how the system
+performs and to what growth should we expect. This will make it easier for us
+to identify bottlenecks and perform more advanced capacity planning.
+
+As we work on first iterations we expect our Database Sharding team and
+Database Scalability Working Group to make progress on patterns we will be able
+to use to partition the large CI/CD dataset. We consider the strong time-decay
+effect, related to the diminishing importance of pipelines with time, as an
+opportunity we might want to seize.
+
+## Iterations
+
+Work required to achieve our next CI/CD scaling target is tracked in the
+[GitLab CI/CD 20M builds per day scaling
+target](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5745) epic.
+
+## Status
+
+In progress.
+
+## Who
+
+Proposal:
+
+<!-- vale gitlab.Spelling = NO -->
+
+| Role                         | Who
+|------------------------------|-------------------------|
+| Author                       | Grzegorz Bizon          |
+| Architecture Evolution Coach | Kamil Trzciński         |
+| Engineering Leader           | Darby Frey              |
+| Product Manager              | Jackie Porter           |
+| Domain Expert / Verify       | Fabio Pitino            |
+| Domain Expert / Database     | Jose Finotto            |
+| Domain Expert / PostgreSQL   | Nikolay Samokhvalov     |
+
+DRIs:
+
+| Role                         | Who
+|------------------------------|------------------------|
+| Leadership                   | Darby Frey             |
+| Product                      | Jackie Porter          |
+| Engineering                  | Grzegorz Bizon         |
+
+Domain experts:
+
+| Area                         | Who
+|------------------------------|------------------------|
+| Domain Expert / Verify       | Fabio Pitino           |
+| Domain Expert / Database     | Jose Finotto           |
+| Domain Expert / PostgreSQL   | Nikolay Samokhvalov    |
+
+<!-- vale gitlab.Spelling = YES -->