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---
status: proposed
creation-date: "2023-05-22"
authors: [ "@grzesiek", "@fabiopitino" ]
coach: [ ]
approvers: [ ]
owning-stage: ""
participating-stages: []
---
<!-- vale gitlab.FutureTense = NO -->
# GitLab Modular Monolith
## Summary
The main [GitLab Rails](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab)
project has been implemented as a large monolithic application, using
[Ruby on Rails](https://rubyonrails.org/) framework. It has over 2.2 million
lines of Ruby code and hundreds of engineers contributing to it every day.
The application has been growing in complexity for more than a decade. The
monolithic architecture has served us well during this time, making it possible
to keep high development velocity and great engineering productivity.
Even though we strive for having [an approachable open-core architecture](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/07/14/open-core-is-worse-than-plugins/)
we need to strengthen the boundaries between domains to retain velocity and
increase development predictability.
As we grow as an engineering organization, we want to explore a slightly
different, but related, architectural paradigm:
[a modular monolith design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_programming),
while still using a [monolithic architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolithic_application)
with satellite services.
This should allow us to increase engineering efficiency, reduce the cognitive
load, and eventually decouple internal components to the extend that will allow
us to deploy and run them separately if needed.
## Motivation
Working with a large and tightly coupled monolithic application is challenging:
Engineering:
- Onboarding engineers takes time. It takes a while before engineers feel
productive due to the size of the context and the amount of coupling.
- We need to use `CODEOWNERS` file feature for several domains but
[these rules are complex](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/409228f064a950af8ff2cecdd138fc9da41c8e63/.gitlab/CODEOWNERS#L1396-1457).
- It is difficult for engineers to build a mental map of the application due to its size.
Even apparently isolated changes can have [far-reaching repercussions](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/#reducing-the-impact-of-far-reaching-work)
on other parts of the monolith.
- Attrition/retention of engineering talent. It is fatiguing and demoralizing for
engineers to constantly deal with the obstacles to productivity.
Architecture:
- There is little structure inside the monolith. We have attempted to enforce
the creation [of some modules](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/212156)
but have no company-wide strategy on what the functional parts of the
monolith should be, and how code should be organized.
- There is no isolation between existing modules. Ruby does not provide
out-of-the-box tools to effectively enforce boundaries. Everything lives
under the same memory space.
- We rarely build abstractions that can boost our efficiency.
- Moving stable parts of the application into separate services is impossible
due to high coupling.
- We are unable to deploy changes to specific domains separately and isolate
failures that are happening inside them.
Productivity:
- High median-time-to-production for complex changes.
- It can be overwhelming for the wider-community members to contribute.
- Reducing testing times requires diligent and persistent efforts.
## Goals
- Increase the development velocity and predicability through separation of concerns.
- Improve code quality by reducing coupling and introducing useful abstractions.
- Build abstractions required to deploy and run GitLab components separately.
## How do we get there?
While we do recognize that modularization is a significant technical endeavor,
we believe that the main challenge is organizational, rather than technical. We
not only need to design separation in a way that modules are decoupled in a
pragmatic way which works well on GitLab.com but also on self-managed
instances, but we need to align modularization with the way in which we want to
work at GitLab.
There are many aspects and details required to make modularization of our
monolith successful. We will work on the aspects listed below, refine them, and
add more important details as we move forward towards the goal:
1. [Deliver modularization proof-of-concepts that will deliver key insights](proof_of_concepts.md)
1. [Align modularization plans to the organizational structure](bounded_contexts.md)
1. Start a training program for team members on how to work with decoupled domains (TODO)
1. Build tools that will make it easier to build decoupled domains through inversion of control (TODO)
1. Separate domains into modules that will reflect organizational structure (TODO)
1. Build necessary services to align frontend and backend modularization (TODO)
1. [Introduce hexagonal architecture within the monolith](hexagonal_monolith/index.md)
1. Introduce clean architecture with one-way-dependencies and host application (TODO)
1. Build abstractions that will make it possible to run and deploy domains separately (TODO)
## Status
In progress.
## References
[List of references](references.md)
|
