August Roadmap 2022

[tjcran]

Roadmap for August

This is not a hard commitment to all of the items presented and other items not listed may also be worked on. This is an experiment in having a public roadmap. If it works well, we may iterate and continue having a monthly roadmap issue.

🛂 Enterprise Licensing

This represents the work needed to allow for license generation and "hiding" enterprise features behind a locked license gate. This is for both frontend and backend related work.

#480 @spikecurtis @presleyp

🔐 OIDC

This will likely be a generic OIDC implementation, similar to the v1 Coder product. However, some considerations need to be made for how we could make this extensible to support advanced auth use cases in the future, like SAML support.

#695 @kylecarbs

🕵️‍♀️ Audit Logging (As an enterprise feature, this is blocked by licensing and may not be possible to include in August)

Audit Logging will be the first released "Enterprise" paid feature. This feature will allow for admins to track events and actions in Coder to maintain security, diagnose and troubleshoot, and better understand usage. This will include both UI, CLI, and exporting via slog capabilities.

#3251 @coadler @Kira-Pilot

🧊 Helm Chart with included k8s workspaces template

For users who want to run their Coder dashboard, and workspaces, in Kubernetes, there should be a Helm chart install that will allow users to install and upgrade their Coder deployment. The first pass will allow for a simple deployment with just a Coder dashboard, but subsequent helm charts should include HA options and the ability to run containerized workspaces in the same K8s cluster.

#2267 @deansheather (finished)
#3265 Owner needed

Local Provisioner Daemons (RFC Needed)

Quote from community-submitted issue (linked below)

Our team's developers need to access their local USB devices in their Coder workspaces via USB/IP, and to minimize the latency between a USB/IP server running on a developer's local machine (which serves the USB hardware they have connected to their machine) and the USB/IP client running in a Coder workspace (which attaches that USB hardware remotely over the network), we'd like our developers to be able to provision Coder workspaces to run on their local machines (e.g. using the Docker Terraform provider).

There are additional use-cases that could be supported by allowing local provisioner daemons and we may be able to unblock new customer adoption.

#44 @dwahler
#909 @dwahler

🕐 Activity Based Auto-stop

Schedule based auto-stop is critical for cost-control for individuals and companies alike, but even with sophisticated notifications and controls for extending the workspace time and "snoozing" shutdown, it's possible that a workspace could still shutdown while you are using it or while it is running a job.

Activity based auto-stop would allow for specific activities to automatically extend the workspace shutdown bumper by +1 hour.

#2995

🚛 Smaller but mighty

💯 Must have

• UX: disabling autostart is difficult #3051 / No way to disable auto start schedule in UI #2960
• CODER_ACCESS_URL shouldn't require protocol #2874
• Instruct admins to set up through CLI  #3223 / Add a registration/set-up page for new admins #3225
• Create lesser admin role #2135
• Safe way to edit workspace parameters via dashboard and CLI #802 / Pressing "Update" on a workspace does not prompt for newly-created variables #2660
• Refactor telemetry for Enterprise Edition #3309
• Move template schedule controls into enterprise #3304

🎨 Nice to have

• Add checkbox input for boolean variable #2659
• Add support for emojis on templates #2262 / Icons for templates #2221
• Feat in v0.7.12 6f34cbf: Add filtering like with Workspaces ⍯ #3054
• Client <> Server version checks should occur in more places #3005
• Workspace schedule bumpers are broken #2764
• Make a more helpful UI error message when failing to update schedule #2752
• Agent fails to connect after updating existing running workspace to new template version #2970
• Allow workspace names to be editable #3000
• Add an example template for Azure #2714
• Improve error message when SSH connection drops #1369
• Template lists should be alphabetical #2836
• Add callout to Templates page that CLI is required to use template #2146
• Improve contrast in UI to show the web terminal is disconnected #3013
• GCP template references Coder terraform provider v0.3.4 that doesn't support coder-app #2966
• No error message when creating a workspace with a conflicting name #2842
• Automatically authenticate user with Coder in a workspace #2840
• ci: improve speeds #3031
• coder templates create using the template docker-image-builds and derivatives fails to build #2815

[ammario]

The "no more god mode" (#2135) should be counted as a smaller must-have item. It should take a few hours at most unless I'm missing something about our implementation.

[ammario]

#2995 is worth consideration. It's probably amongst our top 3 feature requests in terms of feedback.

[ammario]

Note to carry over Resource Metadata and template.yaml from the July roadmap (#3042) that almost certainly will not be finished.

[ammario]

Is Frontend Edit Workspace (#802) really a big feature? The issue describes a page with simple forms and we already have the backend endpoints.

[tjcran]

Is Frontend Edit Workspace really a big feature? The issue describes a page with simple forms and we already have the backend endpoints.

@ammario i think the misalignment is that we don't have a rubric for when something is big enough to be considered a "major" item on the roadmap. I think you're right, though. This one should not be on the "major" list.

[ammario]

@tjcran a heuristic I use is whether we would include the feature in a release blog post. There's still a lot of room for interpretation, but perhaps slightly less.

[spikecurtis]

@tjcran @kylecarbs I feel like I'm seeing a pattern of bugs related to orphaned resources in the cloud provider. It's pretty concerning because it can cause wasted cloud spend. Our architecture mostly trusts the provisioner (terraform) to clean up after itself, but there are clearly edge cases like cancellation of jobs, bugs in terraform providers, etc. I wonder whether we need to think about some sort of reconciliation process.

[tjcran]

@tjcran @kylecarbs I feel like I'm seeing a pattern of bugs related to orphaned resources in the cloud provider. It's pretty concerning because it can cause wasted cloud spend. Our architecture mostly trusts the provisioner (terraform) to clean up after itself, but there are clearly edge cases like cancellation of jobs, bugs in terraform providers, etc. I wonder whether we need to think about some sort of reconciliation process.

This sounds like it needs an epic to wrap all these together? Is there a need for an RFC on this to consider a more holistic strategy for dealing with it?

Also noting #3048 as related

[spikecurtis]

I'd want to start with some strategic discussion & brainstorming, maybe @ketang @kylecarbs @spikecurtis @tjcran (optionally @ammario, optionally other engineers with deep distributed systems experience). One outcome of that discussion could be to move to RFC, but it could also be that we're going to punt on the larger problem and just fix bugs.

[tjcran]

I'd want to start with some strategic discussion & brainstorming, maybe @ketang @kylecarbs @spikecurtis @tjcran (optionally @ammario, optionally other engineers with deep distributed systems experience). One outcome of that discussion could be to move to RFC, but it could also be that we're going to punt on the larger problem and just fix bugs.

@spikecurtis is this RFC something you are proposing for the August roadmap?

[spikecurtis]

My personal feeling is that this trumps several things on the August list, like activity based auto-off.

[ammario]

My personal feeling is that this trumps several things on the August list, like activity based auto-off.

I have encountered the problem personally and I agree it's a fundamental problem with our model that we need to resolve. We have a few issues related to this problem, and no silver bullet has been identified. There are a bunch of small things that make progress, e.g #3035 and #2256 (comment).

But it's not clear what exactly we would pursue on if the "orphanage problem" was added to roadmap.

You can probably think of more/better solutions than the aforementioned issues too.

Another thing to note is activity based auto stop has been requested many times by users where orphanage resolution hasn't.

[tjcran]

I suggest we add the orphaning problem to the roadmap as an RFC item for August so we can work out how to solve it. But I don't think we can properly assess the cost and prioritize it to this month's roadmap without an RFC.

[presleyp]

Just something to be aware of: Licensing and Audit Logging aren't totally separable. They each have independent tasks to start with, but when it's time to add audit logging to the app, it's also time to gate audit logging by license. Seen from the other side, we can't fully implement licensing without a conditional feature to implement it on.

#1763 should be replaced by the first of the two tickets replacing it (the second is less urgent so it's up to you whether it makes it on the August roadmap)

I'm not clear on the requirements for #802 / #2660. #802 was going to be a page you can navigate to whenever you want to change params. #2660 sounds like it's asking for the app to check for template changes when the user clicks Update, and if they exist, display a form to fill in those inputs.

[tjcran]

Just something to be aware of: Licensing and Audit Logging aren't totally separable. They each have independent tasks to start with, but when it's time to add audit logging to the app, it's also time to gate audit logging by license. Seen from the other side, we can't fully implement licensing without a conditional feature to implement it on.

#1763 should be replaced by the first of the two tickets replacing it (the second is less urgent so it's up to you whether it makes it on the August roadmap)

I'm not clear on the requirements for #802 / #2660. #802 was going to be a page you can navigate to whenever you want to change params. #2660 sounds like it's asking for the app to check for template changes when the user clicks Update, and if they exist, display a form to fill in those inputs.

@presleyp good callout. I'll make the update for #1763 item.
The workspace edit issue needs some prep work and some product direction. @bpmct were you still planning to work on that one?

[bpmct]

@presleyp #802 and #2660 is something that we need to define more in August! However, it is still something we want to do in August. It needs an owner and I'd estimate it's fairly complex and needs backend work as well.

[ammario]

For enterprise, #3304 is a good simple initial feature and we've already had a prospect request it.

[ammario]

Here is another simple yet urgent issue since it will help us better understand this early usage and make a better roadmap in September.

[bpmct]

Suggesting we add #2662 as well as a nice-to-have.

Edit: or even a must-have. A lot of our docs will run off scripts to install code-server or projector, and health checks help avoid broken experiences for users before the IDE loads.