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Gitlab's Journey from Azure to GCP

310 points by soheilpro 8y ago

kevinsimper 8y ago
I personally like Google Cloud, but this blogpost feels a bit like a advertisement, it seems pretty clear that Google Cloud has offered a better pricing deal than Azure could and that is why the are moving. > GCP offered the performance and consistency we needed. A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future Azure does a lot of cool stuff as well, not really a valid reason why you would move (other than you got a better deal).
- zeusk 8y ago
  You should've seen their ads when Microsoft announced GitHub acquisition. Maybe GitLab should focus more on their product instead of growth hacking.
  - orf 8y ago
    Adjusting your marketing in light of an industry-shaking acquisition like that is hardly growth hacking. You would be absolutely and completely insane not to execute it in exactly the way they did. Their product is pretty damn good as well, IMO.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Growth hacking is a silly buzzword, it's just marketing. And good marketing involves reacting quickly to position your product when the competitive landscape changes. Sales is the most important thing in the success of a company so this was definitely the right call to make, and I doubt it really affected their product any.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    > Maybe GitLab should focus more on their product To me gitlab already provides the absolute best CICD service. It's like they need work to provide a better service than any of their direct competitors.
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      I've just gone through the process of selecting a new CI/CD provider, and I think GitLab CI is being let down by its tie in to GitLab. I've heard great things about GitLab CI, but we aren't looking to move our version control and there doesn't seem to be a way to have hosted CI from GitLab without it.
      - orf 8y ago
        The tight integration is a big bonus IMO. What Git hosting do you currently use?
      - boleary-gl 8y ago
        GitLab product manager here. Can I ask where you're hosting your code today? We offer first-class support for external repositories stored on GitHub with GitLab CI/CD for GitHub [1]. In addition, you can do similar CI/CD integration with any git repository by URL as well [2]. We see both of these as "minimal" integrations and we're hoping to add more first-class support for external repositories this yeah - but would love to know what you'd focus on first if you were Product Manager for a day :smile: [1] https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/github/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/github/ [2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/github_integration.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/githu...
  - emilycook 8y ago
    GitLab marketing employee here, just popping in to say that a majority of us focus on both (and are encouraged to). While we aren't specifically on the "product" team, we're still code contributors like any other community member. That was one of the biggest perks for me joining a FOSS team.
- azurezyq 8y ago
  I personally also don't buy in the latter. But performance and consistency do play a role in making serious choices. I also agree that they should share some cost analysis results.
  - kevinsimper 8y ago
    And in the blogpost they don't even mention cost as one of the top reasons they are moving, which could justify it. They show that their latency has gone down, but that is not always the reason just because it correlates.
    - fxfan 8y ago
      Because cost isn't the top reason, the top reason is that Google Ventures has investment in Gitlab
  - noahl 8y ago
    They probably can't share their cost analysis. I would expect that most companies that both a) are big enough for the cloud providers to bother talking to and b) have proven they have the ability to run their workloads on multiple clouds are getting discounts from whatever cloud provider they end up using. One condition of these discounts might be that they can't publish exactly the prices they are getting, or any information that would let you infer the price.
- slow_donkey 8y ago
  If they're investing in kubernetes it makes complete sense to switch to GKE over AKS. We used AKS and it gave us tons of trouble while GKE seemed a lot more polished.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Considering Brendan Burns works for Microsoft now...I have doubts that the differences are that staggering at this point. That being said, I generally avoid containers because they are overkill for most workloads, imo, so I can't speak from much experience on the topic.
    - m0zg 8y ago
      Who is this "Brendan Burns" dude and why is everyone treating him like a deity? I've never heard of him even though I spent nearly a decade at Google, some of it in Google Cloud. Much of what Kubernetes is is basically a "lightweight" take on Borg. It even comes through in naming: borglet <-> kubelet, borgmaster <-> kubernetes master. The story of Kubernetes is very much about standing on the shoulders of the giants, and most of those giants (members of the Borg/Omega team) are still there, at Google.
      - kerng 8y ago
        Here is his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590 https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590 Strange you work at Google and not know about him.
        m0zg 8y ago
        Why would it be "strange"? At the time I left Google it was 60K+ people. You'd need to be someone of Mike Burrows' or Jeff Dean's stature to even register on the radar.
        ma2rten 8y ago
        I work at Google, I neither know Brendan Burns nor Mike Burrows. According to his LinkedIn Brendan was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, i.e. Level 7. That is not a particularly high position. My previous manager was a Principle Engineer (Level 8). I am pretty sure no one here ever heard her name.
- deforciant 8y ago
  Unfortunately Azure AKS is quite hacky and shouldn’t be used in production (heard that from MS people). They will be releasing a more production like K8s distro in near future but it will have different caveats. On the other hand if you look at Google GKE - it has been production ready for multiple years with auto upgrades, self healing and just great ui/cli :) so yeah, if they use K8s then GKE makes total sense.
  - CloudNetworking 8y ago
    Isn't AKS a service and not a distro? Are you confusing AKS with ACS?
  - TheIronYuppie 8y ago
    Hi! I cannot stress enough AKS is ready for production, we have many many MANY customers using it. I am EXTREMELY biased, but I do have some background as I was the first/lead PM on GKE for several years. :) If there's something we can do to help, please let me know! Disclosure: I work at Azure on Machine Learning (but not AKS)
- rdslw 8y ago
  Putting aside valid thing that article was written by person with role at gitlab 'Content Marketer', one thing struck me: "This Pingdom graph shows the number of errors we saw per day, first in Azure and then in GCP. The average for the pre-migration period was 8.2 errors per day, while post-migration it’s down to just one error a day." This was measured independently by pingdom, not by gitlab. Hello azure?
  - vidarh 8y ago
    While I have absolutely no love for Azure, it's worth pointing out that doing a migration, any migration to a new environment can often be an opportunity to clean up and fix old junk that has not gotten attention, and that issues in a new environment often end up being treated as a problem caused by the migration and given attention and fixed, where the same issue might have been ignored in the old one because "it's always been there". As a result it's often really hard to tell if all the differences are down to differences in quality between the two providers vs. things done as part of the migration. But of course this also does not mean the providers aren't different in terms of quality, just that it takes more than a graph like that to tell.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      I feel like those posted uptime/reliability numbers are far lower than either GCP or azure is capable of providing. I suspect the majority of the errors/failed requests are probably code bugs or deployment issues in gitlab... Perhaps they haven't been doing enough chaosmonkey testing?
  - emilycook 8y ago
    Hi, GitLab employee from "marketing" here. I take a little offense to > Putting aside valid thing that article was written by person with role at gitlab 'Content Marketer' A lot of us in marketing have technical backgrounds and are GitLab code contributors, that's what made us competitive for the positions we were hired for. We just write a lot of the blog posts so the product teams can focus on their own work. They're also usually very collaborative. Sorry if you meant no offense, it's just a bit of a button-press issue for me!
- ailideex 8y ago
  Anecdotal I guess but I currently it regularly takes more than 10 minutes to delete one VM from Azure.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    I don't see how Azure might be designed causing delays like that. A simple operation of deleting a VM should do an RPC from the API endpoint to a machine-manager type service, which in turn does an RPC to the actual machine. I would expect all that to happen typically within 1 millisecond, and perhaps up to 100 milliseconds at the 99th percentile latency when the VM machine is overloaded/overheating/otherwise unhealthy. So what design did Microsofts engineers pick that can ever take 10 minutes to do anything?
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Let hope they don't deprecate GCP as they usually do with financially not too lucrative services.
- brown9-2 8y ago
  It’s weird to see pricing differences dismissed like this, turns out they matter a lot!
- joeblau 8y ago
  Azure is currently experiencing DNS issues in all regions which is actively causing downtime for my GitLab repos[1]. Whether it feels like advertising or not, their numbers seem to support their claims that GCP is more reliable. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919
- minimaul 8y ago
  Google Ventures funded company in thinly veiled Google Cloud Platform advertising? Shocking.
kerng 8y ago
Microsoft buying Github probably is a big reason Gitlab is a bit sour about Azure I imagine. Because overall this reads more like a sponsored post. Google probably offered a lot of money (good deal) to encourage them to move also.
- qaq 8y ago
  Not sure why you are getting down-voted not having to pay your primary competitor for services obviously had influence on this decision.
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Netflix uses aws, even though amazon has amazon prime video. They don't seem to have no inclination to move.
    - nopzor 8y ago
      netflix pays aws for a very small and non strategic part of their infra. they dont move bits for videos to their users via aws. that would be insane.
      - scurvy 8y ago
        Netflix also arbitrages compute and encode across all major clouds depending on spot pricing. They treat the commodity...like a commodity.
        lawnchair_larry 8y ago
        Since netflix knows they will always be encoding, why would they pay for cloud provider overhead at all? It would seem to be far cheaper to have a dedicated fleet.
        dmitriid 8y ago
        At Netflix scale it’s probably cheaper to leverage cloud solutions than to maintain (build, equip, set up, maintain, upate, upgrade) their own data center.
smoyer 8y ago
A prelude to Google acquiring GitLab?
- reificator 8y ago
  Oh god please no. I want to be using Gitlab 5 years from now, not planning a migration back to Github or whatever when Google loses interest in another toy.
  - tinco 8y ago
    The whole reason I picked Gitlab is that it doesn't matter what Gitlab does, if they pick a weird direction I can just self host and do what I want. Gitlab is big enough that should they ever be killed by a Google acquisition (I don't think that's likely), a strong enough community would sprout and keep maintaining it.
    - jrochkind1 8y ago
      Do you have examples of open source software in a similar situation (one company providing coordination and final approval in the previous project; similar complexity level to Gitlab, whatever that is), where that happened successfully? I'm not challenging necessarily, I legitimately am interested in examples.
      - daxelrod 8y ago
        It depends on your definition of “kill”. OpenSolaris -> Illumos Hudson -> Jenkins OpenOffice -> LibreOffice MySQL -> MariaDB (not killed, but forked out of fear it would be) And a non-Oracle example: Node.js -> IO.js (arguable - forked because Node dev was stagnant, eventually merged)
        oblio 8y ago
        All those had communities outside the main company long before they "moved out". What's the percentage of external contributors to GitLab? 1%?
ralph84 8y ago
GV-funded company gets a great deal on GCP. Film at 11.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
prh8 8y ago
Lots of eye rolling in this thread, but at this same time, another current discussion is full of complaints about Azure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919
- carrja99 8y ago
  Par the course for HN. The other day in a GCP thread people were pining for AWS and wish they could get off of the horrible, non-working Google infra. In another, folks were pining for the days they could migrate off of AWS for GCP and the better managed k8s clusters it would give them.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Almost as if this is a community of thousands of people all with different present needs, future plans, and past experiences.
blazespin 8y ago
Most kube focused customers move to GKE. It really is the best platform and Google is all in. Azure/AWS/etc see it as a commoditizing platform they don't control like Google does, so they'll never be the best. GKE gives a sweet deal to encourage it because they see the long tail revenues. It's a pretty easy decision for anyone based on k8s. I see this more a sponsored ad for kubernetes than I do for Google.
- tw04 8y ago
  >Most kube focused customers move to GKE. Do you have some sort of citations to back this up? Out of the 20-ish or so fortune 500s I work with directly and indirectly, not a single one has a gcp presence and every one of them uses kube somewhere in the business.
  - CloudNetworking 8y ago
    Most of those comments come from folks in the startup scene, so that's what they think the world is. I worked at MS for a few years and during that time everything looked like Enterprise to me, which is the opposite effect :)
    - influx 8y ago
      For some reason it seems Google Cloud folks also swarm this threads. If commenters have Google stock, they probably should disclose that on threads like this.
  - cpitman 8y ago
    I'll back this up, I work with enterprise customers to adopt kubernetes. I frequently have customers do installs on both AWS and Azure. I have never had a customer as much as consider GCP without me asking whether it was an option. Even then, it was uniformly dismissed. Google has a cool platform, but they've got major mindshare issues.
jandeboevrie 8y ago
In their other post you can read that they have just added a few gitaly worker nodes and got better disk IO by not using raid 5. I don't see why the cloud provider is relevant here, could all been done on azure.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"The fundraising values the startup at just over $1 billion, a company spokesman said, making GitLab the latest unicorn in the booming market for digital operations management. Alphabet Inc.’s GV, Iconiq Capital and Khosla Ventures participated in the financing round." [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-backs-gitlab-s-quest-to-surpass-microsoft-s-github https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-...
sara7262 8y ago
They found world's biggest fish Even you can't believe how big fish is this That's unbelievable http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM Even some goats are better than humans See that she did and they made her as mayor of city http://bit.ly/2UjTcS5 http://bit.ly/2UjTcS5 See the video a dog shopping and lots of other acts like humans http://bit.ly/2DCpo9I http://bit.ly/2DCpo9I Even you can't believe there is a hen in world's biggest animals See the video how they looks and what they do https://cutt.ly/1rOU7Q https://cutt.ly/1rOU7Q Fish walking with legs like humans See the video on link below http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD
ncmncm 8y ago
Got off Azure just in time! Here's hoping they get off Google before its meltdown. But Google probably won't melt down. It will just very, very gradually go all to hell, like everything else.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Entropy is a bitch. Enjoy life while you can.
cpgeier 8y ago
Is it concerning to anyone else that Google doesn't release revenue figures on their SEC filings for GCP? I feel like if GCP doesn't get as much traction as other google services it might go the way of Google Plus or incorporated into G Suite.
- briffle 8y ago
  Probably the same Reason Microsoft doesn't release revenue figures for Azure. Azure revenue is lumped in with Office, and not broken out.
pbduring 8y ago
What a coincidence... June is when gitHub was purchased by Microsoft. Let’s make a prediction: Gitlab will be bought by Google within a year.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- emilycook 8y ago
  GitLab employee, actually our plan is to go public by 2020. Our strategy page is public: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy
stevefan1999 8y ago
Unpopular opinion: The third reason why GitLab decided on the Google Cloud Platform: political correctness, not only that GitLab doesn't want to nurture their enemy GitHub, which in turns is acquired by Microsoft causing a political exodus, and GitLab also fears the ties with Azure will make people give up to BitBucket or such again. Therefore it’s a pretty good PR stunt pulled to polarize the situation.
- netheril96 8y ago
  Is this really what “political correctness” means?
  - stevefan1999 8y ago
    Well, despite that, sadly consider the fact that it is "politically correct" to critique Microsoft as "M$", "FUD machine", "evil corp" and "attempted murderer of free software" in the tech world even to this date.
    - throw0824 8y ago
      Aren't the second and fourth just terms they themselves used to describe themselves/ their goals?
- emilycook 8y ago
  Hi, employee from GitLab here. The move to GCP was planned before the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub was announced: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/commit/ab5bf6b03ffc08e4dd2e08a1484a517c642e643c https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/commit/ab5bf6b03ffc0...
MichaelGlass 8y ago
I am so tickled by the last names of the speakers. Einstein introduces Jung.
nik736 8y ago
"A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future". Can someone please link some articles that underline why this is the case? Thanks

310 points by soheilpro 8y ago

I personally like Google Cloud, but this blogpost feels a bit like a advertisement, it seems pretty clear that Google Cloud has offered a better pricing deal than Azure could and that is why the are moving. > GCP offered the performance and consistency we needed. A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future Azure does a lot of cool stuff as well, not really a valid reason why you would move (other than you got a better deal).

zeusk 8y ago
You should've seen their ads when Microsoft announced GitHub acquisition. Maybe GitLab should focus more on their product instead of growth hacking.
- orf 8y ago
  Adjusting your marketing in light of an industry-shaking acquisition like that is hardly growth hacking. You would be absolutely and completely insane not to execute it in exactly the way they did. Their product is pretty damn good as well, IMO.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Growth hacking is a silly buzzword, it's just marketing. And good marketing involves reacting quickly to position your product when the competitive landscape changes. Sales is the most important thing in the success of a company so this was definitely the right call to make, and I doubt it really affected their product any.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  > Maybe GitLab should focus more on their product To me gitlab already provides the absolute best CICD service. It's like they need work to provide a better service than any of their direct competitors.
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    I've just gone through the process of selecting a new CI/CD provider, and I think GitLab CI is being let down by its tie in to GitLab. I've heard great things about GitLab CI, but we aren't looking to move our version control and there doesn't seem to be a way to have hosted CI from GitLab without it.
    - orf 8y ago
      The tight integration is a big bonus IMO. What Git hosting do you currently use?
    - boleary-gl 8y ago
      GitLab product manager here. Can I ask where you're hosting your code today? We offer first-class support for external repositories stored on GitHub with GitLab CI/CD for GitHub [1]. In addition, you can do similar CI/CD integration with any git repository by URL as well [2]. We see both of these as "minimal" integrations and we're hoping to add more first-class support for external repositories this yeah - but would love to know what you'd focus on first if you were Product Manager for a day :smile: [1] https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/github/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/github/ [2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/github_integration.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/githu...
- emilycook 8y ago
  GitLab marketing employee here, just popping in to say that a majority of us focus on both (and are encouraged to). While we aren't specifically on the "product" team, we're still code contributors like any other community member. That was one of the biggest perks for me joining a FOSS team.
azurezyq 8y ago
I personally also don't buy in the latter. But performance and consistency do play a role in making serious choices. I also agree that they should share some cost analysis results.
- kevinsimper 8y ago
  And in the blogpost they don't even mention cost as one of the top reasons they are moving, which could justify it. They show that their latency has gone down, but that is not always the reason just because it correlates.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    Because cost isn't the top reason, the top reason is that Google Ventures has investment in Gitlab
- noahl 8y ago
  They probably can't share their cost analysis. I would expect that most companies that both a) are big enough for the cloud providers to bother talking to and b) have proven they have the ability to run their workloads on multiple clouds are getting discounts from whatever cloud provider they end up using. One condition of these discounts might be that they can't publish exactly the prices they are getting, or any information that would let you infer the price.
slow_donkey 8y ago
If they're investing in kubernetes it makes complete sense to switch to GKE over AKS. We used AKS and it gave us tons of trouble while GKE seemed a lot more polished.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Considering Brendan Burns works for Microsoft now...I have doubts that the differences are that staggering at this point. That being said, I generally avoid containers because they are overkill for most workloads, imo, so I can't speak from much experience on the topic.
  - m0zg 8y ago
    Who is this "Brendan Burns" dude and why is everyone treating him like a deity? I've never heard of him even though I spent nearly a decade at Google, some of it in Google Cloud. Much of what Kubernetes is is basically a "lightweight" take on Borg. It even comes through in naming: borglet <-> kubelet, borgmaster <-> kubernetes master. The story of Kubernetes is very much about standing on the shoulders of the giants, and most of those giants (members of the Borg/Omega team) are still there, at Google.
    - kerng 8y ago
      Here is his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590 https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590 Strange you work at Google and not know about him.
      - m0zg 8y ago
        Why would it be "strange"? At the time I left Google it was 60K+ people. You'd need to be someone of Mike Burrows' or Jeff Dean's stature to even register on the radar.
        ma2rten 8y ago
        I work at Google, I neither know Brendan Burns nor Mike Burrows. According to his LinkedIn Brendan was a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, i.e. Level 7. That is not a particularly high position. My previous manager was a Principle Engineer (Level 8). I am pretty sure no one here ever heard her name.
deforciant 8y ago
Unfortunately Azure AKS is quite hacky and shouldn’t be used in production (heard that from MS people). They will be releasing a more production like K8s distro in near future but it will have different caveats. On the other hand if you look at Google GKE - it has been production ready for multiple years with auto upgrades, self healing and just great ui/cli :) so yeah, if they use K8s then GKE makes total sense.
- CloudNetworking 8y ago
  Isn't AKS a service and not a distro? Are you confusing AKS with ACS?
- TheIronYuppie 8y ago
  Hi! I cannot stress enough AKS is ready for production, we have many many MANY customers using it. I am EXTREMELY biased, but I do have some background as I was the first/lead PM on GKE for several years. :) If there's something we can do to help, please let me know! Disclosure: I work at Azure on Machine Learning (but not AKS)
rdslw 8y ago
Putting aside valid thing that article was written by person with role at gitlab 'Content Marketer', one thing struck me: "This Pingdom graph shows the number of errors we saw per day, first in Azure and then in GCP. The average for the pre-migration period was 8.2 errors per day, while post-migration it’s down to just one error a day." This was measured independently by pingdom, not by gitlab. Hello azure?
- vidarh 8y ago
  While I have absolutely no love for Azure, it's worth pointing out that doing a migration, any migration to a new environment can often be an opportunity to clean up and fix old junk that has not gotten attention, and that issues in a new environment often end up being treated as a problem caused by the migration and given attention and fixed, where the same issue might have been ignored in the old one because "it's always been there". As a result it's often really hard to tell if all the differences are down to differences in quality between the two providers vs. things done as part of the migration. But of course this also does not mean the providers aren't different in terms of quality, just that it takes more than a graph like that to tell.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    I feel like those posted uptime/reliability numbers are far lower than either GCP or azure is capable of providing. I suspect the majority of the errors/failed requests are probably code bugs or deployment issues in gitlab... Perhaps they haven't been doing enough chaosmonkey testing?
- emilycook 8y ago
  Hi, GitLab employee from "marketing" here. I take a little offense to > Putting aside valid thing that article was written by person with role at gitlab 'Content Marketer' A lot of us in marketing have technical backgrounds and are GitLab code contributors, that's what made us competitive for the positions we were hired for. We just write a lot of the blog posts so the product teams can focus on their own work. They're also usually very collaborative. Sorry if you meant no offense, it's just a bit of a button-press issue for me!
ailideex 8y ago
Anecdotal I guess but I currently it regularly takes more than 10 minutes to delete one VM from Azure.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  I don't see how Azure might be designed causing delays like that. A simple operation of deleting a VM should do an RPC from the API endpoint to a machine-manager type service, which in turn does an RPC to the actual machine. I would expect all that to happen typically within 1 millisecond, and perhaps up to 100 milliseconds at the 99th percentile latency when the VM machine is overloaded/overheating/otherwise unhealthy. So what design did Microsofts engineers pick that can ever take 10 minutes to do anything?
StreamBright 8y ago
Let hope they don't deprecate GCP as they usually do with financially not too lucrative services.
brown9-2 8y ago
It’s weird to see pricing differences dismissed like this, turns out they matter a lot!
joeblau 8y ago
Azure is currently experiencing DNS issues in all regions which is actively causing downtime for my GitLab repos[1]. Whether it feels like advertising or not, their numbers seem to support their claims that GCP is more reliable. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919
minimaul 8y ago
Google Ventures funded company in thinly veiled Google Cloud Platform advertising? Shocking.

kerng 8y ago

Microsoft buying Github probably is a big reason Gitlab is a bit sour about Azure I imagine. Because overall this reads more like a sponsored post. Google probably offered a lot of money (good deal) to encourage them to move also.

qaq 8y ago
Not sure why you are getting down-voted not having to pay your primary competitor for services obviously had influence on this decision.
- earenndil 8y ago
  Netflix uses aws, even though amazon has amazon prime video. They don't seem to have no inclination to move.
  - nopzor 8y ago
    netflix pays aws for a very small and non strategic part of their infra. they dont move bits for videos to their users via aws. that would be insane.
    - scurvy 8y ago
      Netflix also arbitrages compute and encode across all major clouds depending on spot pricing. They treat the commodity...like a commodity.
      - lawnchair_larry 8y ago
        Since netflix knows they will always be encoding, why would they pay for cloud provider overhead at all? It would seem to be far cheaper to have a dedicated fleet.
        dmitriid 8y ago
        At Netflix scale it’s probably cheaper to leverage cloud solutions than to maintain (build, equip, set up, maintain, upate, upgrade) their own data center.

smoyer 8y ago

A prelude to Google acquiring GitLab?

reificator 8y ago
Oh god please no. I want to be using Gitlab 5 years from now, not planning a migration back to Github or whatever when Google loses interest in another toy.
- tinco 8y ago
  The whole reason I picked Gitlab is that it doesn't matter what Gitlab does, if they pick a weird direction I can just self host and do what I want. Gitlab is big enough that should they ever be killed by a Google acquisition (I don't think that's likely), a strong enough community would sprout and keep maintaining it.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Do you have examples of open source software in a similar situation (one company providing coordination and final approval in the previous project; similar complexity level to Gitlab, whatever that is), where that happened successfully? I'm not challenging necessarily, I legitimately am interested in examples.
    - daxelrod 8y ago
      It depends on your definition of “kill”. OpenSolaris -> Illumos Hudson -> Jenkins OpenOffice -> LibreOffice MySQL -> MariaDB (not killed, but forked out of fear it would be) And a non-Oracle example: Node.js -> IO.js (arguable - forked because Node dev was stagnant, eventually merged)
      - oblio 8y ago
        All those had communities outside the main company long before they "moved out". What's the percentage of external contributors to GitLab? 1%?

ralph84 8y ago

GV-funded company gets a great deal on GCP. Film at 11.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

prh8 8y ago

Lots of eye rolling in this thread, but at this same time, another current discussion is full of complaints about Azure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919

carrja99 8y ago
Par the course for HN. The other day in a GCP thread people were pining for AWS and wish they could get off of the horrible, non-working Google infra. In another, folks were pining for the days they could migrate off of AWS for GCP and the better managed k8s clusters it would give them.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Almost as if this is a community of thousands of people all with different present needs, future plans, and past experiences.

blazespin 8y ago

Most kube focused customers move to GKE. It really is the best platform and Google is all in. Azure/AWS/etc see it as a commoditizing platform they don't control like Google does, so they'll never be the best. GKE gives a sweet deal to encourage it because they see the long tail revenues. It's a pretty easy decision for anyone based on k8s. I see this more a sponsored ad for kubernetes than I do for Google.

tw04 8y ago
>Most kube focused customers move to GKE. Do you have some sort of citations to back this up? Out of the 20-ish or so fortune 500s I work with directly and indirectly, not a single one has a gcp presence and every one of them uses kube somewhere in the business.
- CloudNetworking 8y ago
  Most of those comments come from folks in the startup scene, so that's what they think the world is. I worked at MS for a few years and during that time everything looked like Enterprise to me, which is the opposite effect :)
  - influx 8y ago
    For some reason it seems Google Cloud folks also swarm this threads. If commenters have Google stock, they probably should disclose that on threads like this.
- cpitman 8y ago
  I'll back this up, I work with enterprise customers to adopt kubernetes. I frequently have customers do installs on both AWS and Azure. I have never had a customer as much as consider GCP without me asking whether it was an option. Even then, it was uniformly dismissed. Google has a cool platform, but they've got major mindshare issues.

jandeboevrie 8y ago

In their other post you can read that they have just added a few gitaly worker nodes and got better disk IO by not using raid 5. I don't see why the cloud provider is relevant here, could all been done on azure.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"The fundraising values the startup at just over $1 billion, a company spokesman said, making GitLab the latest unicorn in the booming market for digital operations management. Alphabet Inc.’s GV, Iconiq Capital and Khosla Ventures participated in the financing round." [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-backs-gitlab-s-quest-to-surpass-microsoft-s-github https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-...

sara7262 8y ago

They found world's biggest fish Even you can't believe how big fish is this That's unbelievable http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM http://bit.ly/2FHl4pM Even some goats are better than humans See that she did and they made her as mayor of city http://bit.ly/2UjTcS5 http://bit.ly/2UjTcS5 See the video a dog shopping and lots of other acts like humans http://bit.ly/2DCpo9I http://bit.ly/2DCpo9I Even you can't believe there is a hen in world's biggest animals See the video how they looks and what they do https://cutt.ly/1rOU7Q https://cutt.ly/1rOU7Q Fish walking with legs like humans See the video on link below http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD

ncmncm 8y ago

Got off Azure just in time! Here's hoping they get off Google before its meltdown. But Google probably won't melt down. It will just very, very gradually go all to hell, like everything else.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Entropy is a bitch. Enjoy life while you can.

cpgeier 8y ago

Is it concerning to anyone else that Google doesn't release revenue figures on their SEC filings for GCP? I feel like if GCP doesn't get as much traction as other google services it might go the way of Google Plus or incorporated into G Suite.

briffle 8y ago
Probably the same Reason Microsoft doesn't release revenue figures for Azure. Azure revenue is lumped in with Office, and not broken out.

pbduring 8y ago

What a coincidence... June is when gitHub was purchased by Microsoft. Let’s make a prediction: Gitlab will be bought by Google within a year.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
emilycook 8y ago
GitLab employee, actually our plan is to go public by 2020. Our strategy page is public: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy

stevefan1999 8y ago

Unpopular opinion: The third reason why GitLab decided on the Google Cloud Platform: political correctness, not only that GitLab doesn't want to nurture their enemy GitHub, which in turns is acquired by Microsoft causing a political exodus, and GitLab also fears the ties with Azure will make people give up to BitBucket or such again. Therefore it’s a pretty good PR stunt pulled to polarize the situation.

netheril96 8y ago
Is this really what “political correctness” means?
- stevefan1999 8y ago
  Well, despite that, sadly consider the fact that it is "politically correct" to critique Microsoft as "M$", "FUD machine", "evil corp" and "attempted murderer of free software" in the tech world even to this date.
  - throw0824 8y ago
    Aren't the second and fourth just terms they themselves used to describe themselves/ their goals?
emilycook 8y ago
Hi, employee from GitLab here. The move to GCP was planned before the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub was announced: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/commit/ab5bf6b03ffc08e4dd2e08a1484a517c642e643c https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/commit/ab5bf6b03ffc0...

MichaelGlass 8y ago

I am so tickled by the last names of the speakers. Einstein introduces Jung.

nik736 8y ago

"A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future". Can someone please link some articles that underline why this is the case? Thanks