Not to second guess the infrastructure architects at GitLab, but just to bring up a data point they might possibly not be aware of : Joyent virtual hosts have s

Not to second guess the infrastructure architects at GitLab, but just to bring up a data point they might possibly not be aware of : Joyent virtual hosts have significatly better I/O performance profiles -- see https://www.joyent.com/blog/docker-bake-off-aws-vs-joyent https://www.joyent.com/blog/docker-bake-off-aws-vs-joyent for detail. Don't necessarily write off the cloud -- there are different clouds out there and if I was running something I/O intensive, I'd want to try it on Joyent. That said, nothing beats complete control, if you have the resources to handle that level of responsibility. =)