gitpod-io/gitpod: technical due diligence, read from its repository

The median source file here is 64 lines. 14 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 2,874. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.

97 files were marked deprecated over two years ago and still are, the oldest since Aug 2020. A deprecation is a promise to remove. Ask what still depends on these, and whether removing them is scheduled.

The newest release, 2022.11.3, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is 2022.05.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.

3 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day; 1 step pipes a download straight into a shell. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.

8 HTTP calls use a client with no timeout (Python `requests` without `timeout=`, or Go's default client). When a dependency slows down, each one holds a worker until the connection gives up, and enough of them take the service down with the dependency.

3 places in product code build SQL by formatting or joining strings rather than passing parameters. In each, what the code shows going in is a table or column name, a constant, or something the line does not show, not a request's value. Ask whether any value reaches these strings, rather than a parameter.

2 workload manifests set no CPU or memory limits. One pod that leaks memory or spins can starve everything else on its node, and the scheduler cannot plan capacity for what it cannot see.

Third-party code is committed into this repository without any statement of the terms it arrived under. Unknown terms are harder to deal with than inconvenient ones: an awkward licence can be complied with, an absent one cannot. Each of these needs its origin established before the code changes hands.

Nothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.

1 deployments set `replicas: 1`, and nothing (an autoscaler, a disruption budget) adds more. Every deploy and every node drain is downtime, and the availability the buyer inherits has a ceiling.