15 ms·

GitLab is now running on GCP

253 points by sahin-boydas 8y ago

unvs 8y ago
Backstory: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp/
- lawl 8y ago
  Real backstory: https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Github being owned by Microsoft has 0 relevance for any competent technical organization.
    - lawl 8y ago
      Saying anyone who cares about Github now being owned by Microsoft is incompetent is borderline ad-hominem. We have seen embrace-extend-extinguish from MS before. Even if you believe they've changed there's no reason to label everyone else as incompetent.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        That's not what I'm saying. The news has 0 relevance to teams, whether those teams care or not. Github was a for-profit organization losing massive amounts of money with stalled development and weak features compared to competitors. It's only major asset was the large community. It now has a many more resources to stay around long-term and finally start building better products. Your data is also 1-click away from being exported and git is already distributed meaning every developer has a complete clone. What possible issue is there to worry about?
  - txcwpalpha 8y ago
    Why does this dumb story keep getting posted on every GitLab thread? GitLab started the move to GCP way, way before the acquisition from MS happened. They are not related.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      > Why does this dumb story keep getting posted on every GitLab thread? I suspect it's because some people really like microsoft and are personally offended that a customer left.
      - adventured 8y ago
        Or it's just the penchant across Internet forums for the 'real truth.' Reddit is overflowing with it. People often like to believe they have knowledge that few others possess, special insight. They're not fooled by the mainstream media, they see around corners and through the guise, they've got it figured out. There's a massive culture for that today, which is where the Alex Jones, flat earth, etc. popularity boom comes from. Those people used to be a lot more isolated, now they can link up and spread their special insider knowledge, which leads to every story having an alternate 'real truth.'
      - lawl 8y ago
        >I suspect it's because some people really like microsoft and are personally offended that a customer left. I would do the same thing. Not sure what you're implying. Now get back to hobby and improve pmos (pls).
  - pfg 8y ago
    The GCP move was decided upon months before Microsoft acquired GitHub[1]. [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando...
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      No doubt, but the Microsoft acquisition must have pushed the priority of the move through the roof.
      - lbotos 8y ago
        Negative. I work at GitLab. I can assure you that GitHub getting acquired did not have any bearing on the speed at which we made this migration happen. It's been in the works for a long time, and in none of the meetings I've attended has anyone said "Github now is owned by Microsoft, we need to get on GCP FASTER."
        lawl 8y ago
        Someone should have then. On the other hand, you only talk about the speed of the migration, could also be an overly-specific denial and you've known about a potential acquisition before. Call me a tinfoil nutjob, I still don't buy it and would move away from azure too in that situation.
  - acdha 8y ago
    Do you have any evidence backing that up? It seems unlikely that, say, Microsoft would endanger a large and growing business by artificially sabotaging GitLab in a way which would be quite obvious.
    - d0m 8y ago
      Who cares about evidence and "what's more likely". Would you host your product on your competitor's servers? I'm not saying that's why they switched, but from a business perspective it makes sense to remove that risk.
      - acdha 8y ago
        What’s the actual risk? Once you’re off in conspiracy land, why not worry that they’ll pay off a supplier or something? In the real world, blowing an Azure contract or SLA would cost more in lost business than they paid for GitHub entirely.
    - CommanderData 8y ago
      I can't think of any good reasons to keep your product hosted at the hands of your biggest competitor. Yes there are examples out there but I think this is a very different situation where proprietary technology is a main advantage. Any reason to suggest otherwise is dwarf by this reason alone. Good move and logical.
  - YorickPeterse 8y ago
    The move has nothing to do with Microsoft acquiring GitHub.
  - dictum 8y ago
    It's less about getting away from Microsoft and more about getting closer to Google: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c-round-led-by-gv/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c... While other commenters have criticized the "hidden truth" angle of this comment, I'd like to point out that some insiders may have foreseen GitHub aligning with MS a little earlier. I had a hunch, way before Microsoft announced the acquisition, that if GitHub was ever sold it would be to MS, as it aligns with their outreach to open source developers. At the same time, they were quite active on, and happy to endorse GitHub, which is a kind of cross-promotion large corporations only do when they're stakeholders of the smaller company (or at least have some contract defining the terms and legal consequences related to this PR activity)
    - mcintyre1994 8y ago
      Microsoft became and are extremely active on Github, but were they really uniquely endorsing it among large tech companies? AFAIK Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix all run all their open source stuff through Github. Even Apple for the open source stuff they actually want people to use.
deleted 8y ago
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ljm 8y ago
GKE is fantastic to work with, we rolled with that on a nascent project in favour of Heroku and other PaaS. We had one or two rough spots but we’re not paying nearly as much as we would to have the entire thing managed by other parties, along with the accounting and awareness overhead that incurs. Kubernetes has a learning curve but it delivers an elegance too. The ulterior motive is that understanding Kubernetes now has serious professional value in and of itself, so if the product fails your experience certainly doesn’t. That said, I’m surprised Gitlab didn’t announce a new nav redesign at the same time ;)
- moltar 8y ago
  But the cost of Heroku on free, or nearly free tier, isn’t comparable to GKE. When I tried to launch a demo cluster it was basically launching numerous VMs just to support itself. I don’t know the monthly total, since I abandoned that idea pretty quick. But I imagine it’d be over $50/mo to run a tiny web app. My point is that every offering has its place. Heroku is great for getting going. Recently I’ve been experimenting with Dokku. I think it’s a totally viable alternative to Heroku. I do value my time, and understand the value of PaaS. But when Heroku starts charging insane amounts for Redis memory, it made me look for easy alternatives and Dokku fits the bill well.
  - grezql 8y ago
    GKE is free. You could run a micro vm for 5$ with kubernetes orchestring it.
    - xur17 8y ago
      GKE itself is free - you have to pay for each node you use though, and GKE requires some core services that take up most of the space on 1-2 standard nodes in your cluster.
  - koolba 8y ago
    You can have it both ways by leveraging the free / hobby tier of Heroku with bringing your own data store. Nothing binds you to their resource providers. Just add an environment variable for your own database or Redis provider.
andrewl-hn 8y ago
Has anybody tried GKE and EKS from Amazon? What's your opinion on the later?
- programd 8y ago
  Here's a nice recent blog post about various issues you have to deal with to even set up a EKS cluster in AWS: https://medium.com/@dmaas/setting-up-amazon-eks-what-you-must-know-9b9c39627fbc https://medium.com/@dmaas/setting-up-amazon-eks-what-you-mus... I get the impression that compared to GKE, EKS is not yet fully baked as an easy to use product. It still involves too much manual fiddling around (e.g. see above) and operational complexity. I'd advise any clients of mine who want to run Kubernetes in the cloud to stick to GKE for now. The lower prices on GKE are a nice bonus also. That said, I don't discount what Amazon can do in this space. If they make the setup/admin experience as easy as spinning up a VM on AWS then Google will have a serious competitor. But not yet. BTW, for smaller shops and solo devs, I hear good things about the upcoming Digital Ocean Kubernetes service. It's in beta right now: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/
  - tofflos 8y ago
    I've spent the past two weeks trying to get Gitlab and Amazon EKS up and running and that blog post is pretty much spot on. I'm actually halfway through exploring some of the ingress options discussed in the post but I think I'm just going to try another provider now. Thanks for posting.
  - runeks 8y ago
    > BTW, for smaller shops and solo devs, I hear good things about the upcoming Digital Ocean Kubernetes service. How would smaller shops and/or solo devs benefit from using Digital Ocean Kubernetes service over GKE?
- ilikerashers 8y ago
  I recently had a deep dive on EKS as part of an architectural review for a large scale (200+) microservice deployment. The recommendation was to strongly avoid EKS. Bad enough that the platform is brittle and expensive, the Amazon engineers sneered at Kubernetes as a "fad" and pushed us heavily towards ECS. I put it down to hubris but not a hope in hell we'd put our services onto a platform built with that attitude.
smnrchrds 8y ago
I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.
- miracle2k 8y ago
  Exactly right. Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject. Imagining Google Cloud having as much market share as AWS is downright nightmarish. It would break large parts of the internet in those countries. I regularly travel to Iran, and can attest to a large number of random breakages (for example: the documentation of the date-fns library, because it loads data from Firebase). Google as an infrastructure provider simply has no business being involved in where my content is available. If they sell me a server that is not accessible from certain locations on the internet, I consider them to be selling a broken product.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    Google is very pro-government, pro-censorship, pro-regulations, pro-military. It's better to just accept that it will never be a decent infrastructure provider because of that.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - glogla 8y ago
      I know Amazon or Microsoft aren't much better, but it's sad to see Gitlab use Google. I though Gitlab are the good guys.
      - smallbigfish 8y ago
        Last year we couldn't access some aws server at work because it was on US gov blacklist. An aws server that hosted maybe hundreds of other unrelated websites. Amazon is just as bad. But I guess they have better PR.
Proven 8y ago
Why should Gitlab users care or even need to know where it runs? You are going out of your way to please the anti-MS crowd, that's a sad way to appeal to prospects. Of course if/when you get acquired by Google your users will be in the same spot. :-)
deleted 8y ago
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mattlondon 8y ago
Anyone noticed any performance changes? Anyone from Gitlab have any data to share? I had a look at https://monitor.gitlab.net/d/000000003/fleet-overview?refresh=5m&orgId=1 https://monitor.gitlab.net/d/000000003/fleet-overview?refres... but don't know what I am looking at :-) General browsing around feels snappier than it did before. I just tried importing some new repos from Github and it was fast (like 2 or 3 seconds for tiny repos, under 10s for larger ones). During the aftermath of the Github acquisition repo imports were taking days, but that was probably because of the load I guess. Would be good to back this up wit some data :-)
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  A lot of the performance gains you get from GCP come from taking shortcuts over private fibre. Traffic inbound to a GCP-hosted system first goes to a local point-of-presence, then makes relatively few hops to reach its destination via Google's private fibre network. You can get a discount if you let packets make their own way to the destination over the public internet, but in practice that will make sense for cost-sensitive bulk operations, rather than interactive usage.
- cutety 8y ago
  I’d also be interested in some actual performance metrics/benchmarks. I’m a big fan of gitlab, love gitlab CI, and I Iike (most of) the UI more than github’s, but my one biggest gripe with it it is how sluggish browsing it at times could be, groaning if I accidentally clicked the wrong file because now I have to wait/stop that and go back and then wait for the one I actually wanted. It’s certainly improved over the last year to the point where I only occasionally had to sigh as I navigated through a repo, but it’s been creeping towards GitHub level performance at least. However, I did take a few minutes just now while I’m farting around on my phone on the toilet to go and browse through random repos, opening random files, looking through issues/merge requests, etc, and it definitely seem noticeably snappier, opening large files from my phone seemed to be as quick as github, no sitting twiddling my thumbs waiting for a 200+ line file to load like I had previously experienced many times. Hopefully someone can confirm this with some actual numbers, but first impressions are pleasant. If the performance improvements are actually significant, and hold up overtime, this will certainly help gitlab’s ever growing popularity as the one complaint I always see get brought up in gitlab discussions is it’s performance (aside from a few that don’t like the UI — but that’s a bit more towards personal preference rather than objective metrics). It’ll likely take some classic 80s-90s Microsoft “business strategy”, or more recently what they did with Skype, for gitlab to ever have a chance at overtaking github. But, as a gitlab user, and fan of competition/not having essentially a single (closed source) entity being the “hub” of all open source code. All this said, while I’m more than happy to see major performance improvements to gitlab.com, what would make me even happier is to see some performance improvements for self hosted instances. But, I realize that takes quite a bit more work to improve since it likely involves quite a bit of code/app level optimizations, rather than just throwing more computing power at it. Our instance at work is usable, but good lord can opening large files/directories be annoying, and since unfortunately gitlab isn’t really considered a hyper critical system at my workplace, deploying it to largely scaled & optimized GCP/AWS/Azure infra isn’t likely going to be an option anytime soon. So, gitlab just please don’t forget about us lowly folks that have it deployed to a small cluster/single server who can’t just throw more and more resources at it. Also, if there any gitlab folks reading my rant, and you want to grant a wish of mine/make my work life significantly more enjoyable, if you guys could get back to the people that have been in contact with you about getting a education gitlab ultimate license (I work at a large university)[1], I’d likely forget about the performance issues entirely. They said they reached out to you guys, however they said they were told the education license program wasn’t ready to be completely rolled out or something? [1] https://about.gitlab.com/education/ https://about.gitlab.com/education/
2_listerine_pls 8y ago
Maybe they want to be acquired by google
- whoisjuan 8y ago
  You doubt it? Google is an investor in GitLab. They also push heavily for GCP to their customers offering USD 200 free credits (above the USD 300 you get by default). Zero marketing mentions regarding integrations with AWS, Azure or any other cloud providers. I wouldn't be surprised if they are hostile in terms of integrating with other Cloud providers. You even get marketing promotions about GCP in the consoles empty states. Sometimes it feels like a cheap Google adware. I cringe when I see so many Google references in GitLab. GitLab is basically a subsidiary of Google Cloud at this point. I really like GitLab since their service and user experience is top notch. I use it in all my side projects. I just wish they weren't so heavily biased to push and promote GCP. If they advertised themselves as a cloud agnostic and completely independent Git solution, I would be more trusting of their service. But the reality is the opposite. Sadly.
  - williamchia 8y ago
    Hi, GitLabber here. There are several inaccuracies in your comment. Hopefully, I can clarify and comment. > Google is an investor in GitLab Not true. GV invested in GitLab. GV != Google. (Just do a web search to learn the difference.) > push heavily for GCP to their customers offering USD 200 free credits True. It's free credit for our users, of course, we let them know :) Note that this is Google's standard partner credit. All their partners offer this. It's not unique to GitLab. > Zero marketing mentions regarding integrations with AWS Not true. Amazon is also a GitLab partner, and We officially support EKS: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/eks-gitlab-integration/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/eks-gitlab-integration/ > Sometimes it feels like a cheap Google adware. This may be accurate. I think we got this wrong the 1st time out of the gate. Here's an issue where we improved the look and feel to be less 'adware' and more informative. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/48804 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/48804 > advertised themselves as a cloud agnostic We are a cloud-agnostic company and we do advertise it. (e.g. even in our launch post for the GCP marketplace we make a point to say "you can install GitLab almost anywhere" https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/18/install-gitlab-one-click-gcp-marketplace/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/18/install-gitlab-one-click...) Although, perhaps not enough. This is good feedback that we need to make this message more front-and-center.
mdaniel 8y ago
I missed watching their livestream as it was 3am, and my YouTube search-fu isn't good enough to find the archive link. Is there an archive link, or is it just gone because I didn't watch right then?
- sytse 8y ago
  We didn't do a livestream since we were concerned about showing credentials in the terminal in case things didn't go according to plan. We did record it and plan to publish it since it went according to plan.
  - mdaniel 8y ago
    Great, thank you for clarifying that. I haven't yet had to carry out such a massively involved migration plan, and so I'm always interested in learning from the process of others. And congratulations to the whole team on the move. I know it must be a relief now that it's behind you.
    - edjboston 8y ago
      Thank you. It's not quite over though. Monday traffic will be far higher than the weekend. People will need to login, which will put unusual stress on those endpoints. Also, there is a small chance someone experiences malformed or missing data. There was only a single repo that we know experienced this, which we're already working on. So I'm only talking about unknown unknowns. So we will be on high alert to respond to any such requests and retrieve data from the archives in the previous infrastructure.
  - edjboston 8y ago
    GitLab VPE here. This instinct proved correct. We'll look into editing the video this week after the team gets a breather.
sargun 8y ago
Why did GitLab go to Azure in the first place?
- latchkey 8y ago
  Usually because of discounted or free credit.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
Interesting to see this now and then go back and read their post from 2016 where they stated they knew it was "time to move away from the cloud." https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/
- sytse 8y ago
  See https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-t... for why we're still in the cloud.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Thanks! Good read.

253 points by sahin-boydas 8y ago

unvs 8y ago

Backstory: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp/

lawl 8y ago
Real backstory: https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/ https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-g...
- manigandham 8y ago
  Github being owned by Microsoft has 0 relevance for any competent technical organization.
  - lawl 8y ago
    Saying anyone who cares about Github now being owned by Microsoft is incompetent is borderline ad-hominem. We have seen embrace-extend-extinguish from MS before. Even if you believe they've changed there's no reason to label everyone else as incompetent.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      That's not what I'm saying. The news has 0 relevance to teams, whether those teams care or not. Github was a for-profit organization losing massive amounts of money with stalled development and weak features compared to competitors. It's only major asset was the large community. It now has a many more resources to stay around long-term and finally start building better products. Your data is also 1-click away from being exported and git is already distributed meaning every developer has a complete clone. What possible issue is there to worry about?
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  Why does this dumb story keep getting posted on every GitLab thread? GitLab started the move to GCP way, way before the acquisition from MS happened. They are not related.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    > Why does this dumb story keep getting posted on every GitLab thread? I suspect it's because some people really like microsoft and are personally offended that a customer left.
    - adventured 8y ago
      Or it's just the penchant across Internet forums for the 'real truth.' Reddit is overflowing with it. People often like to believe they have knowledge that few others possess, special insight. They're not fooled by the mainstream media, they see around corners and through the guise, they've got it figured out. There's a massive culture for that today, which is where the Alex Jones, flat earth, etc. popularity boom comes from. Those people used to be a lot more isolated, now they can link up and spread their special insider knowledge, which leads to every story having an alternate 'real truth.'
    - lawl 8y ago
      >I suspect it's because some people really like microsoft and are personally offended that a customer left. I would do the same thing. Not sure what you're implying. Now get back to hobby and improve pmos (pls).
- pfg 8y ago
  The GCP move was decided upon months before Microsoft acquired GitHub[1]. [1]: https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando...
  - JetSpiegel 8y ago
    No doubt, but the Microsoft acquisition must have pushed the priority of the move through the roof.
    - lbotos 8y ago
      Negative. I work at GitLab. I can assure you that GitHub getting acquired did not have any bearing on the speed at which we made this migration happen. It's been in the works for a long time, and in none of the meetings I've attended has anyone said "Github now is owned by Microsoft, we need to get on GCP FASTER."
      - lawl 8y ago
        Someone should have then. On the other hand, you only talk about the speed of the migration, could also be an overly-specific denial and you've known about a potential acquisition before. Call me a tinfoil nutjob, I still don't buy it and would move away from azure too in that situation.
- acdha 8y ago
  Do you have any evidence backing that up? It seems unlikely that, say, Microsoft would endanger a large and growing business by artificially sabotaging GitLab in a way which would be quite obvious.
  - d0m 8y ago
    Who cares about evidence and "what's more likely". Would you host your product on your competitor's servers? I'm not saying that's why they switched, but from a business perspective it makes sense to remove that risk.
    - acdha 8y ago
      What’s the actual risk? Once you’re off in conspiracy land, why not worry that they’ll pay off a supplier or something? In the real world, blowing an Azure contract or SLA would cost more in lost business than they paid for GitHub entirely.
  - CommanderData 8y ago
    I can't think of any good reasons to keep your product hosted at the hands of your biggest competitor. Yes there are examples out there but I think this is a very different situation where proprietary technology is a main advantage. Any reason to suggest otherwise is dwarf by this reason alone. Good move and logical.
- YorickPeterse 8y ago
  The move has nothing to do with Microsoft acquiring GitHub.
- dictum 8y ago
  It's less about getting away from Microsoft and more about getting closer to Google: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c-round-led-by-gv/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20m-series-c... While other commenters have criticized the "hidden truth" angle of this comment, I'd like to point out that some insiders may have foreseen GitHub aligning with MS a little earlier. I had a hunch, way before Microsoft announced the acquisition, that if GitHub was ever sold it would be to MS, as it aligns with their outreach to open source developers. At the same time, they were quite active on, and happy to endorse GitHub, which is a kind of cross-promotion large corporations only do when they're stakeholders of the smaller company (or at least have some contract defining the terms and legal consequences related to this PR activity)
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    Microsoft became and are extremely active on Github, but were they really uniquely endorsing it among large tech companies? AFAIK Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix all run all their open source stuff through Github. Even Apple for the open source stuff they actually want people to use.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ljm 8y ago

GKE is fantastic to work with, we rolled with that on a nascent project in favour of Heroku and other PaaS. We had one or two rough spots but we’re not paying nearly as much as we would to have the entire thing managed by other parties, along with the accounting and awareness overhead that incurs. Kubernetes has a learning curve but it delivers an elegance too. The ulterior motive is that understanding Kubernetes now has serious professional value in and of itself, so if the product fails your experience certainly doesn’t. That said, I’m surprised Gitlab didn’t announce a new nav redesign at the same time ;)

moltar 8y ago
But the cost of Heroku on free, or nearly free tier, isn’t comparable to GKE. When I tried to launch a demo cluster it was basically launching numerous VMs just to support itself. I don’t know the monthly total, since I abandoned that idea pretty quick. But I imagine it’d be over $50/mo to run a tiny web app. My point is that every offering has its place. Heroku is great for getting going. Recently I’ve been experimenting with Dokku. I think it’s a totally viable alternative to Heroku. I do value my time, and understand the value of PaaS. But when Heroku starts charging insane amounts for Redis memory, it made me look for easy alternatives and Dokku fits the bill well.
- grezql 8y ago
  GKE is free. You could run a micro vm for 5$ with kubernetes orchestring it.
  - xur17 8y ago
    GKE itself is free - you have to pay for each node you use though, and GKE requires some core services that take up most of the space on 1-2 standard nodes in your cluster.
- koolba 8y ago
  You can have it both ways by leveraging the free / hobby tier of Heroku with bringing your own data store. Nothing binds you to their resource providers. Just add an environment variable for your own database or Redis provider.

andrewl-hn 8y ago

Has anybody tried GKE and EKS from Amazon? What's your opinion on the later?

programd 8y ago
Here's a nice recent blog post about various issues you have to deal with to even set up a EKS cluster in AWS: https://medium.com/@dmaas/setting-up-amazon-eks-what-you-must-know-9b9c39627fbc https://medium.com/@dmaas/setting-up-amazon-eks-what-you-mus... I get the impression that compared to GKE, EKS is not yet fully baked as an easy to use product. It still involves too much manual fiddling around (e.g. see above) and operational complexity. I'd advise any clients of mine who want to run Kubernetes in the cloud to stick to GKE for now. The lower prices on GKE are a nice bonus also. That said, I don't discount what Amazon can do in this space. If they make the setup/admin experience as easy as spinning up a VM on AWS then Google will have a serious competitor. But not yet. BTW, for smaller shops and solo devs, I hear good things about the upcoming Digital Ocean Kubernetes service. It's in beta right now: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/
- tofflos 8y ago
  I've spent the past two weeks trying to get Gitlab and Amazon EKS up and running and that blog post is pretty much spot on. I'm actually halfway through exploring some of the ingress options discussed in the post but I think I'm just going to try another provider now. Thanks for posting.
- runeks 8y ago
  > BTW, for smaller shops and solo devs, I hear good things about the upcoming Digital Ocean Kubernetes service. How would smaller shops and/or solo devs benefit from using Digital Ocean Kubernetes service over GKE?
ilikerashers 8y ago
I recently had a deep dive on EKS as part of an architectural review for a large scale (200+) microservice deployment. The recommendation was to strongly avoid EKS. Bad enough that the platform is brittle and expensive, the Amazon engineers sneered at Kubernetes as a "fad" and pushed us heavily towards ECS. I put it down to hubris but not a hope in hell we'd put our services onto a platform built with that attitude.

smnrchrds 8y ago

I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.

miracle2k 8y ago
Exactly right. Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject. Imagining Google Cloud having as much market share as AWS is downright nightmarish. It would break large parts of the internet in those countries. I regularly travel to Iran, and can attest to a large number of random breakages (for example: the documentation of the date-fns library, because it loads data from Firebase). Google as an infrastructure provider simply has no business being involved in where my content is available. If they sell me a server that is not accessible from certain locations on the internet, I consider them to be selling a broken product.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  Google is very pro-government, pro-censorship, pro-regulations, pro-military. It's better to just accept that it will never be a decent infrastructure provider because of that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - glogla 8y ago
    I know Amazon or Microsoft aren't much better, but it's sad to see Gitlab use Google. I though Gitlab are the good guys.
    - smallbigfish 8y ago
      Last year we couldn't access some aws server at work because it was on US gov blacklist. An aws server that hosted maybe hundreds of other unrelated websites. Amazon is just as bad. But I guess they have better PR.

Proven 8y ago

Why should Gitlab users care or even need to know where it runs? You are going out of your way to please the anti-MS crowd, that's a sad way to appeal to prospects. Of course if/when you get acquired by Google your users will be in the same spot. :-)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mattlondon 8y ago

Anyone noticed any performance changes? Anyone from Gitlab have any data to share? I had a look at https://monitor.gitlab.net/d/000000003/fleet-overview?refresh=5m&orgId=1 https://monitor.gitlab.net/d/000000003/fleet-overview?refres... but don't know what I am looking at :-) General browsing around feels snappier than it did before. I just tried importing some new repos from Github and it was fast (like 2 or 3 seconds for tiny repos, under 10s for larger ones). During the aftermath of the Github acquisition repo imports were taking days, but that was probably because of the load I guess. Would be good to back this up wit some data :-)

jacques_chester 8y ago
A lot of the performance gains you get from GCP come from taking shortcuts over private fibre. Traffic inbound to a GCP-hosted system first goes to a local point-of-presence, then makes relatively few hops to reach its destination via Google's private fibre network. You can get a discount if you let packets make their own way to the destination over the public internet, but in practice that will make sense for cost-sensitive bulk operations, rather than interactive usage.
cutety 8y ago
I’d also be interested in some actual performance metrics/benchmarks. I’m a big fan of gitlab, love gitlab CI, and I Iike (most of) the UI more than github’s, but my one biggest gripe with it it is how sluggish browsing it at times could be, groaning if I accidentally clicked the wrong file because now I have to wait/stop that and go back and then wait for the one I actually wanted. It’s certainly improved over the last year to the point where I only occasionally had to sigh as I navigated through a repo, but it’s been creeping towards GitHub level performance at least. However, I did take a few minutes just now while I’m farting around on my phone on the toilet to go and browse through random repos, opening random files, looking through issues/merge requests, etc, and it definitely seem noticeably snappier, opening large files from my phone seemed to be as quick as github, no sitting twiddling my thumbs waiting for a 200+ line file to load like I had previously experienced many times. Hopefully someone can confirm this with some actual numbers, but first impressions are pleasant. If the performance improvements are actually significant, and hold up overtime, this will certainly help gitlab’s ever growing popularity as the one complaint I always see get brought up in gitlab discussions is it’s performance (aside from a few that don’t like the UI — but that’s a bit more towards personal preference rather than objective metrics). It’ll likely take some classic 80s-90s Microsoft “business strategy”, or more recently what they did with Skype, for gitlab to ever have a chance at overtaking github. But, as a gitlab user, and fan of competition/not having essentially a single (closed source) entity being the “hub” of all open source code. All this said, while I’m more than happy to see major performance improvements to gitlab.com, what would make me even happier is to see some performance improvements for self hosted instances. But, I realize that takes quite a bit more work to improve since it likely involves quite a bit of code/app level optimizations, rather than just throwing more computing power at it. Our instance at work is usable, but good lord can opening large files/directories be annoying, and since unfortunately gitlab isn’t really considered a hyper critical system at my workplace, deploying it to largely scaled & optimized GCP/AWS/Azure infra isn’t likely going to be an option anytime soon. So, gitlab just please don’t forget about us lowly folks that have it deployed to a small cluster/single server who can’t just throw more and more resources at it. Also, if there any gitlab folks reading my rant, and you want to grant a wish of mine/make my work life significantly more enjoyable, if you guys could get back to the people that have been in contact with you about getting a education gitlab ultimate license (I work at a large university)[1], I’d likely forget about the performance issues entirely. They said they reached out to you guys, however they said they were told the education license program wasn’t ready to be completely rolled out or something? [1] https://about.gitlab.com/education/ https://about.gitlab.com/education/

2_listerine_pls 8y ago

Maybe they want to be acquired by google

whoisjuan 8y ago
You doubt it? Google is an investor in GitLab. They also push heavily for GCP to their customers offering USD 200 free credits (above the USD 300 you get by default). Zero marketing mentions regarding integrations with AWS, Azure or any other cloud providers. I wouldn't be surprised if they are hostile in terms of integrating with other Cloud providers. You even get marketing promotions about GCP in the consoles empty states. Sometimes it feels like a cheap Google adware. I cringe when I see so many Google references in GitLab. GitLab is basically a subsidiary of Google Cloud at this point. I really like GitLab since their service and user experience is top notch. I use it in all my side projects. I just wish they weren't so heavily biased to push and promote GCP. If they advertised themselves as a cloud agnostic and completely independent Git solution, I would be more trusting of their service. But the reality is the opposite. Sadly.
- williamchia 8y ago
  Hi, GitLabber here. There are several inaccuracies in your comment. Hopefully, I can clarify and comment. > Google is an investor in GitLab Not true. GV invested in GitLab. GV != Google. (Just do a web search to learn the difference.) > push heavily for GCP to their customers offering USD 200 free credits True. It's free credit for our users, of course, we let them know :) Note that this is Google's standard partner credit. All their partners offer this. It's not unique to GitLab. > Zero marketing mentions regarding integrations with AWS Not true. Amazon is also a GitLab partner, and We officially support EKS: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/eks-gitlab-integration/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/06/eks-gitlab-integration/ > Sometimes it feels like a cheap Google adware. This may be accurate. I think we got this wrong the 1st time out of the gate. Here's an issue where we improved the look and feel to be less 'adware' and more informative. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/48804 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/48804 > advertised themselves as a cloud agnostic We are a cloud-agnostic company and we do advertise it. (e.g. even in our launch post for the GCP marketplace we make a point to say "you can install GitLab almost anywhere" https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/18/install-gitlab-one-click-gcp-marketplace/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/18/install-gitlab-one-click...) Although, perhaps not enough. This is good feedback that we need to make this message more front-and-center.

mdaniel 8y ago

I missed watching their livestream as it was 3am, and my YouTube search-fu isn't good enough to find the archive link. Is there an archive link, or is it just gone because I didn't watch right then?

sytse 8y ago
We didn't do a livestream since we were concerned about showing credentials in the terminal in case things didn't go according to plan. We did record it and plan to publish it since it went according to plan.
- mdaniel 8y ago
  Great, thank you for clarifying that. I haven't yet had to carry out such a massively involved migration plan, and so I'm always interested in learning from the process of others. And congratulations to the whole team on the move. I know it must be a relief now that it's behind you.
  - edjboston 8y ago
    Thank you. It's not quite over though. Monday traffic will be far higher than the weekend. People will need to login, which will put unusual stress on those endpoints. Also, there is a small chance someone experiences malformed or missing data. There was only a single repo that we know experienced this, which we're already working on. So I'm only talking about unknown unknowns. So we will be on high alert to respond to any such requests and retrieve data from the archives in the previous infrastructure.
- edjboston 8y ago
  GitLab VPE here. This instinct proved correct. We'll look into editing the video this week after the team gets a breather.

sargun 8y ago

Why did GitLab go to Azure in the first place?

latchkey 8y ago
Usually because of discounted or free credit.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago

Interesting to see this now and then go back and read their post from 2016 where they stated they knew it was "time to move away from the cloud." https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/10/why-choose-bare-metal/

sytse 8y ago
See https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-t... for why we're still in the cloud.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Thanks! Good read.