AngularJS long-term support

[mshustov]

As announced in https://blog.angular.io/finding-a-path-forward-with-angularjs-7e186fdd4429
AngularJS is no longer supported after 31.12.2021
With an option to continue having a paid support for security fixes.

We still have quite a few plugins relying on AngularJS:

• dashboard
• discover
• kibana_legacy
• timelion
• vis_type_table
• beats_management
• graph
• monitoring

Some are in the (not very active) process of moving from Angular to React, some are going to be removed in v8.0 release.
Although we will have to maintain them for several years along with 7.last release.

We need to decide what is our support strategy for the listed plugins - should we consider 3rd party support or we maintain our own angular fork.
@kobelb

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-operations (Team:Operations)

[joshdover]

Thanks for filing this. I want to ping these teams just to confirm the detailed status of each of these plugins:

@elastic/kibana-app I believe we are removing timelion in 8.0, correct?

Do we have plans to completely remove Angular from dashboard, discover, kibana_legacy, vis_type_table, graph?

@elastic/stack-monitoring Are there any plans to remove Angular from monitoring?

@elastic/ingest-management Are we going to be able to remove beats_management in 8.0?

[flash1293]

dashboard is owned by @elastic/kibana-presentation but AFAIK removing angular is actively worked on.
For the kibana app plugins: discover is actively worked on, vis_type_table, timelion and kibana_legacy shouldn't be an issue because it's just things waiting for the big 8.0 to do breaking changes. graph is the biggest issue here, @timroes seems like we need to free up some dev time to migrate it to react.

[ThomThomson]

Angular routing was removed from Dashboard in: #82909. I left in a single usage of angular.toJson which I can look into removing ASAP.

[jen-huang]

@elastic/ingest-management Are we going to be able to remove beats_management in 8.0?

Yes, we are still planning on removing it for 8.0.

[chrisronline]

@elastic/stack-monitoring Are there any plans to remove Angular from monitoring?

Yes, but a timeline is not clear right now. cc @jasonrhodes

[mshustov]

@joshdover even if the timelion and beats_management are going to be removed in v8, we have to support them in 7.last release over the next few years.

Deleting Angular from other apps after v8.0 is preferable, but it's a separate issue.

[timroes]

I think we might run into the problem of having Angular in 7.last. The only other option I can currentlty see is that we'd need to spend some time rewriting applications that we know are removed in 8.0. I only want to raise that for the timelion app, that's not a minor task, so we should carefully evaluate if we want to spend that time to get rid of Angular for 7.last, if that would be the option.

cc @timductive

[mshustov]

The only other option I can currentlty see is that we'd need to spend some time rewriting applications that we know are removed in 8.0.

for beats_management all angular code is in a single file https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/4584a8b570402aa07832cf3e5b520e5d2cfa7166/x-pack/plugins/beats_management/public/lib/adapters/framework/kibana_framework_adapter.ts

@jen-huang is it something that you can do before 7.last release?

[jen-huang]

@restrry I didn't realize the angular code was so minimal. We'll add it to our roadmap for 7.14.

[chrisronline]

@joshdover @restrry We made #90254 to track/discuss removing angular from monitoring

[ph]

@restrry the argument of @timroes is really valid for us, in 8.0 we want to remove beats management. But I think this application is in a really weird place, it never was out of beta, it's not really supported and in our documentation we clearly says we have stopped development.

I'd say that maybe we could just remove it before 8.0 and not bother with the transition, I am going to followup on that.

Also 7.last will be available and supported for a very long time and its a really long time for an unsupported feature.

[joshdover]

I suspect that a commercial support license is going to be a much more cost-efficient option than spending our time on migrating away from Angular, especially in apps that aren't going to be sticking around. We took this option with Hapi and I see no reason we'd not take a similar path here (unless the license is very expensive).

@kobelb @stacey-gammon Who should own investigating this option?

[kobelb]

@joshdover I've added it to the agenda for our next tech-lead sync. I'll let you know what is decided.

[ph]

To make sure the decision is here, We have decided to remove beats central management in 7.14, so we won't need to migrate to Angular. cc @mostlyjason

[mshustov]

@ph @jen-huang is the removal of beats central management planned in the v7.14 roadmap?

[jen-huang]

@mshustov Yep, it is.

[timroes]

After more discussions in other places, we decided to fully remove AngularJS by 7.16. I am thus superseeding this issue with #105711