Supported Geo data types

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A Geo data type is a specific class of data that is required by one or more GitLab features to store relevant information.

To replicate data produced by these features with Geo, we use several strategies to access, transfer, and verify them.

Data types

We distinguish between three different data types:

• Git repositories
• Blobs
• Database

See the list below of each feature or component we replicate, its corresponding data type, replication, and verification methods:

Footnotes:

1. Redis replication can be used as part of HA with Redis sentinel. It's not used between Geo sites.
2. Object storage replication can be performed by Geo or by your object storage provider/appliance native replication feature.
3. Object Storage verification is behind a feature flag, geo_object_storage_verification, introduced in 16.4 and enabled by default. It uses a checksum of the file size to verify the files.

Git repositories

A GitLab instance can have one or more repository shards. Each shard has a Gitaly instance that is responsible for allowing access and operations on the locally stored Git repositories. It can run on a machine:

• With a single disk.
• With multiple disks mounted as a single mount-point (like with a RAID array).
• Using LVM.

GitLab does not require a special file system and can work with a mounted Storage Appliance. However, there can be performance limitations and consistency issues when using a remote file system.

Geo triggers garbage collection in Gitaly to deduplicate forked repositories on Geo secondary sites.

The Gitaly gRPC API does the communication, with three possible ways of synchronization:

• Using regular Git clone/fetch from one Geo site to another (with special authentication).
• Using repository snapshots (for when the first method fails or repository is corrupt).
• Manual trigger from the Admin Area (a combination of both of the above).

Each project can have at most 3 different repositories:

• A project repository, where the source code is stored.
• A wiki repository, where the wiki content is stored.
• A design repository, where design artifacts are indexed (assets are actually in LFS).

They all live in the same shard and share the same base name with a -wiki and -design suffix for Wiki and Design Repository cases.

Besides that, there are snippet repositories. They can be connected to a project or to some specific user. Both types are synced to a secondary site.

Blobs

GitLab stores files and blobs such as Issue attachments or LFS objects into either:

• The file system in a specific location.
• An Object Storage solution. Object Storage solutions can be:
  • Cloud based like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.
  • Hosted by you (like MinIO).
  • A Storage Appliance that exposes an Object Storage-compatible API.

When using the file system store instead of Object Storage, use network mounted file systems to run GitLab when using more than one node.

With respect to replication and verification:

• We transfer files and blobs using an internal API request.
• With Object Storage, you can either:
  • Use a cloud provider replication functionality.
  • Have GitLab replicate it for you.

Database

GitLab relies on data stored in multiple databases, for different use-cases. PostgreSQL is the single point of truth for user-generated content in the Web interface, like issues content, comments as well as permissions and credentials.

PostgreSQL can also hold some level of cached data like HTML-rendered Markdown and cached merge-requests diff. This can also be configured to be offloaded to object storage.

We use PostgreSQL's own replication functionality to replicate data from the primary to secondary sites.

We use Redis both as a cache store and to hold persistent data for our background jobs system. Because both use-cases have data that are exclusive to the same Geo site, we don't replicate it between sites.

Elasticsearch is an optional database for advanced search. It can improve search in both source-code level, and user generated content in issues, merge requests, and discussions. Elasticsearch is not supported in Geo.

Limitations on replication/verification

The following table lists the GitLab features along with their replication and verification status on a secondary site.

You can keep track of the progress to implement the missing items in these epics/issues:

• Geo: Improve the self-service Geo replication framework
• Geo: Move existing blobs to framework

Replicated data types behind a feature flag

The replication for some data types is behind a corresponding feature flag:

• They're deployed behind a feature flag, enabled by default.
• They're enabled on GitLab.com.
• They can't be enabled or disabled per-project.
• They are recommended for production use.
• For GitLab self-managed instances, GitLab administrators can opt to disable them.

Enable or disable replication (for some data types)

Replication for some data types are released behind feature flags that are enabled by default. GitLab administrators with access to the GitLab Rails console can opt to disable it for your instance. You can find feature flag names of each of those data types in the notes column of the table below.

To disable, such as for package file replication:

Feature.disable(:geo_package_file_replication)

To enable, such as for package file replication:

Feature.enable(:geo_package_file_replication)

WARNING: Features not on this list, or with No in the Replicated column, are not replicated to a secondary site. Failing over without manually replicating data from those features causes the data to be lost. To use those features on a secondary site, or to execute a failover successfully, you must replicate their data using some other means.

Footnotes:

1. Migrated to self-service framework in 15.5. See GitLab issue #337436 for more details.
2. Migrated to self-service framework in 15.11. Behind feature flag geo_project_wiki_repository_replication, enabled by default. See GitLab issue #367925 for more details.
3. Verification of files stored in object storage was introduced in GitLab 16.4 with a feature flag named geo_object_storage_verification, enabled by default.