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I used to think that a collection of standalone tools was better and that we should focus on code hosting and review. When Dmitriy started with GitLab CI I was

by sytse 10y ago

I used to think that a collection of standalone tools was better and that we should focus on code hosting and review. When Dmitriy started with GitLab CI I was dismissive but of course as the author he could do as he pleased. It turned out that having a CI tool that closely works together with the main product was a better experience, especially behind the firewall/single-tenant/on-premises. Then Dmitriy and Kamil (our CI lead) proposed integrating the CI coordinated into GitLab the main program instead of a standalone Ruby on Rails app. Again I was sceptical. But this has been a great success. We have all the API's (webhooks, commit status API, etc.) to integrate well with Jenkins (and we'll make sure that we'll always play well with that, JIRA, Slack, and others). But having everything in one interface and one datastore makes for a much better user experience. We've since doubled-down on this strategy. Bringing the entire software development lifecycle under one roof https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope During the webinar we'll show a demo video of how these components will soon work together. We think it is an amazing experience and everyone on our team is focussed to get it right.

contingencies 10y ago
Give me a rolling upgrade AWS/Rackspace/wherever (I choose) private hosted version of Gitlab with everything just working for under or equal to Github's USD$25/month and you have my business. Do a bulk deal, get some custom instances, lower the overheads. IMHO the pain of Gitlab (which I've used ~2008-now?) has always been unfamiliarity, UI obtuseness (recently vastly improved) and maintainability. Kill those - you're well on the way to doing so - and you'll gain market share quickly. You can even sell stuff like storage space, redundancy and global POPs as real time deployable add-on packages.
- brodock 10y ago
  Did you know about https://githost.io/ https://githost.io/ ? It's managed by GitLab Inc and it's the closest you get from "Insert your credit card here, and hit a button" to get your own GitLab instance.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    Hey wow that's just what I wanted! Only issue is it's $10 a month more than Github for the base setup, $15 extra for CI, while carrying hardware/storage limitations versus Github. https://githost.io/#pricing https://githost.io/#pricing
scrollaway 10y ago
This stuff sounds incredibly exciting. Replacing Jenkins has been... a frustrating experience met with nothing but hollow shells of services. We want to self-host, we want something that can deploy our code, we want to be able to write arbitrary jobs not tied to specific github projects. The Jenkins ecosystem is atrociously bad. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly active, but it promotes a "just make a plugin for everything" attitude which results in things like, plugins to echo this or that, plugins to do a million things better done from the shell, etc. On top of that, the Jenkins UI is just... bad. It's ugly and it's a UX disaster. I could go on. Yet, there's nothing better than Jenkins out there right now. Drone claims to want to replace Jenkins, but doesn't even have support for arbitrary jobs. I'd love more recommendations. This is why, a while back here on HN, I asked if I could pick up the Gitlab job runner in golang and slap a different web UI on top of it that manages the jobs. This doesn't appear to be possible but I see the value in such a runner existing. Running the jobs is a critical component of such tools. I just finished setting up a complete pipeline for a new business with my cofounder: Jenkins was a big pain point. Terraform was a pain point. Ansible was a pain point. Getting a vault solution set up and done right was a massive pain point. We've been striving to make things as simple as possible for developers so I wish you the absolute best of luck in what you're doing, I'm continuously impressed with Gitlab. Email me if you have questions Sytse, I'd love to give more feedback -- email on my profile.
- kbrownlees 10y ago
  The new version of drone (0.5) is much better imho, although it is still in beta so can be a bit frustrating at times. They have relaxed a bunch of the constraints and removed alot of the magic. Plus plugins are alot easier to write now. (Not involved, just a happy user)
- stock_toaster 10y ago
  > I'd love more recommendations. I have been using buildkite lately, and it has worked rather well. You run the agent on your own hardware, and buildkite itself just acts as a coordinator and log collector.
- sytse 10y ago
  We don't like plugins because they are a bad user experience, make it hard to upgrade, and make it hard to improve the product. We rather see people contribute features to GitLab itself including tests. This way we can make sure they are nicely integrated in the UI and that they still work when we release a new version of GitLab. This allows users to upgrade with confidence and it allows us to make major changes to GitLab. I'm not sure what you use case it but GitLab CI is pretty extensive and I hope it has everything you need. Please let me know if there is anything missing. If you want to host your code somewhere else you can still use remote mirroring to have GitLab do the deploy. The GitLab Runner is a simple piece of software on purpose. This allows us to port it to many platforms. All the logic is in GitLab itself so it is easy to provide a lot of feedback about the status in the UI.

by sytse 10y ago

contingencies 10y ago

Give me a rolling upgrade AWS/Rackspace/wherever (I choose) private hosted version of Gitlab with everything just working for under or equal to Github's USD$25/month and you have my business. Do a bulk deal, get some custom instances, lower the overheads. IMHO the pain of Gitlab (which I've used ~2008-now?) has always been unfamiliarity, UI obtuseness (recently vastly improved) and maintainability. Kill those - you're well on the way to doing so - and you'll gain market share quickly. You can even sell stuff like storage space, redundancy and global POPs as real time deployable add-on packages.

brodock 10y ago
Did you know about https://githost.io/ https://githost.io/ ? It's managed by GitLab Inc and it's the closest you get from "Insert your credit card here, and hit a button" to get your own GitLab instance.
- contingencies 10y ago
  Hey wow that's just what I wanted! Only issue is it's $10 a month more than Github for the base setup, $15 extra for CI, while carrying hardware/storage limitations versus Github. https://githost.io/#pricing https://githost.io/#pricing

scrollaway 10y ago

This stuff sounds incredibly exciting. Replacing Jenkins has been... a frustrating experience met with nothing but hollow shells of services. We want to self-host, we want something that can deploy our code, we want to be able to write arbitrary jobs not tied to specific github projects. The Jenkins ecosystem is atrociously bad. Don't get me wrong, it's incredibly active, but it promotes a "just make a plugin for everything" attitude which results in things like, plugins to echo this or that, plugins to do a million things better done from the shell, etc. On top of that, the Jenkins UI is just... bad. It's ugly and it's a UX disaster. I could go on. Yet, there's nothing better than Jenkins out there right now. Drone claims to want to replace Jenkins, but doesn't even have support for arbitrary jobs. I'd love more recommendations. This is why, a while back here on HN, I asked if I could pick up the Gitlab job runner in golang and slap a different web UI on top of it that manages the jobs. This doesn't appear to be possible but I see the value in such a runner existing. Running the jobs is a critical component of such tools. I just finished setting up a complete pipeline for a new business with my cofounder: Jenkins was a big pain point. Terraform was a pain point. Ansible was a pain point. Getting a vault solution set up and done right was a massive pain point. We've been striving to make things as simple as possible for developers so I wish you the absolute best of luck in what you're doing, I'm continuously impressed with Gitlab. Email me if you have questions Sytse, I'd love to give more feedback -- email on my profile.

kbrownlees 10y ago
The new version of drone (0.5) is much better imho, although it is still in beta so can be a bit frustrating at times. They have relaxed a bunch of the constraints and removed alot of the magic. Plus plugins are alot easier to write now. (Not involved, just a happy user)
stock_toaster 10y ago
> I'd love more recommendations. I have been using buildkite lately, and it has worked rather well. You run the agent on your own hardware, and buildkite itself just acts as a coordinator and log collector.
sytse 10y ago
We don't like plugins because they are a bad user experience, make it hard to upgrade, and make it hard to improve the product. We rather see people contribute features to GitLab itself including tests. This way we can make sure they are nicely integrated in the UI and that they still work when we release a new version of GitLab. This allows users to upgrade with confidence and it allows us to make major changes to GitLab. I'm not sure what you use case it but GitLab CI is pretty extensive and I hope it has everything you need. Please let me know if there is anything missing. If you want to host your code somewhere else you can still use remote mirroring to have GitLab do the deploy. The GitLab Runner is a simple piece of software on purpose. This allows us to port it to many platforms. All the logic is in GitLab itself so it is easy to provide a lot of feedback about the status in the UI.