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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 th

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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
      The tight integration is a big bonus IMO. What Git hosting do you currently use?
    - boleary-gl 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Because cost isn't the top reason, the top reason is that Google Ventures has investment in Gitlab
- noahl 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Isn't AKS a service and not a distro? Are you confusing AKS with ACS?
- TheIronYuppie 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
Anecdotal I guess but I currently it regularly takes more than 10 minutes to delete one VM from Azure.
- londons_explore 7y 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 7y ago
Let hope they don't deprecate GCP as they usually do with financially not too lucrative services.
brown9-2 7y ago
It’s weird to see pricing differences dismissed like this, turns out they matter a lot!
joeblau 7y 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 7y ago
Google Ventures funded company in thinly veiled Google Cloud Platform advertising? Shocking.

zeusk 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    The tight integration is a big bonus IMO. What Git hosting do you currently use?
  - boleary-gl 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Because cost isn't the top reason, the top reason is that Google Ventures has investment in Gitlab
noahl 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
Isn't AKS a service and not a distro? Are you confusing AKS with ACS?
TheIronYuppie 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago

Anecdotal I guess but I currently it regularly takes more than 10 minutes to delete one VM from Azure.

londons_explore 7y 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 7y ago

Let hope they don't deprecate GCP as they usually do with financially not too lucrative services.

brown9-2 7y ago

It’s weird to see pricing differences dismissed like this, turns out they matter a lot!

joeblau 7y 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 7y ago

Google Ventures funded company in thinly veiled Google Cloud Platform advertising? Shocking.