Epic: Enable in-place workspace application upgrades

[atduarte]

Currently all workspace application changes require the deployment of a new workspace cluster generation which hinders deployment frequency, infrastructure costs, and engineering speed.

We want to make it possible to do in-place upgrades for all workspace application-level roll-outs to mitigate those issues.

Value

1. Enabling Gitpod Dedicated growth
2. Increased deployment frequency
3. Reduced engineering effort wasted on manual procedures
4. Reduced infrastructure costs

Success Criteria

1. Workspace application level roll-outs of multiple Gitpod installations are achievable with a click of button
2. Roll-out success is automatically monitored, and in case of issues roll-back is automatically initiated
3. Manual rollback should be similarly possible
4. Roll-outs and roll-backs result in no service disruption

Dependencies

• [ws-manager] maintenance mode #15409
• Epic: Rewrite ws-manager as a Kubernetes controller #11416
• Dedicated support for in-place upgrades
• make registry-facade support in-place upgrades
• make ws-proxy support in-place upgrades
• remove gRPC calls from image-builder-mk3

Plan

TBD

Resources

Upgrading Gitpod in a Dedicated world - Gap analysis (internal)

FAQ

1. Can we unlock any value before completing Epic: Rewrite ws-manager as a Kubernetes controller #11416?

[kylos101]

👋 we are attempting a 🛹 in #15409, it'll let us try in-place upgrades for Gitpod Dedicated

[kylos101]

@corneliusludmann does the Scout Team plan to implement in-place upgrades for Workspace components in Gitpod Dedicated using our new #15444? I assume yes, that is in support of milestone 4 or milestone 5, but am unsure which milestone it is really being targeted for. For the meantime, Workspace team is beginning work on #11416, such that we may use it to achieve in-place upgrades for gitpod.io, too.

cc: @atduarte

[stale]

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