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As much as I like gitlab, that decision seems weird. I'd expect a business to come up with numbers for different scenarios, not just quotes (even if those weren
by dx034 10y ago
As much as I like gitlab, that decision seems weird. I'd expect a business to come up with numbers for different scenarios, not just quotes (even if those weren't the only deciding factor).
What I mean is, instead of writing about 8TB disks vs 2TB disks, get hard numbers for those and calculate costs for different versions to the costs in the cloud.
Instead of saying that engineers are expensive, look at market data to determine how much you have to pay to hire these people.
Instead of writing about the potential of full cabinets, get quotes from data center providers of what they can provide and how they would deal with this. I'm sure Equinix has solutions for that kind of problem.
And in addition to that, it seems that managed dedicated wasn't considered at all. Why hire someone to swap disks for you? Why not just renting capacity for servers and have the data center provider taking care of hardware issues? They operate at bigger scale and can do this with little overhead costs. You're still much cheaper than the cloud but don't need to drive somewhere to swap a server (you just switch to a spare one until the data center fixed the problem). With Gitlab's scale, it shouldn't be too hard to get a decent bespoke quote from companies like OVH.
- discordianfish 10y agoThey also miss out on the dog fooding aspect. They target enterprise customers who run probably run gitlab on bare metal. By doing the same, you experience what your customers do and have much closer feedback loops on any issues that might especially affect bare metal. Regarding managed dedicated.. I had very bad experience with rackspace in that regard, which is why we moved AWS. At another job we had our own DC suite but had some company taking care of initial cabling as well as remote hands from the datacenter. If I ever do bare metal again, that's why I would do.
- sytse 10y agoI agree that dogfooding is important. Our users and customers run GitLab both on bare-metal and in the cloud. GitLab runs better on bare-metal because it tends to have better IO performance. So by running it in the cloud we are optimizing where it is needed.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago"What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!" -- Robert A. Heinlein