3 ms·

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

by 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!
- rdslw 7y ago
  I did not write anything about author having/not having technical skills. You're reading it between lines, and in my opinion it shows (again: for me) kind of insecurity. I suspect that emphasis of 'being competitive for the positions we were hired' also shows it. But it's my opinion. What I wrote (and what I stand for) is that it is good to know that this article was written by 'content marketer' - meaning person with a SPECIFIC agenda for writing that article (by definition of 'content marketing' itself). Thats always good to know. If anybody praises something I always prefer to know if there is something (e.g. salary?) which may created/influenced/PAID such opinion. We (hackernews) derided it on many ocassions. To give different example: I personally ask all bankers if they have commission on me (for specific recommended product), or not. And I consider it healthy to know and ask. To make it clear, I think that there is a good content marketing, and that there is a a bad content marketing. The bad for example can be seen easily with searching google for "blog 10 best sleeeping bags" and similar.
  - cbuchanan 7y ago
    Hi, the content marketer here. I'm just quoting the presentation we gave at Google Cloud Next '19 almost exactly. Instead of making you watch a 30+ minute video, I outlined the core points from the presentation so that you could still be in the loop. While I don't take offense to your comment, I think you made it for a reason. It's an ad hominem fallacy. These are our staff engineer's words almost to the letter, if I had posted it in his name would you have taken it at face value? I think it's important for us to ask these questions of ourselves and analyze why we form certain opinions. That said, I do appreciate the feedback, and thank you for your comments. I'll try to keep your opinions in mind with future posts as I certainly never want to come off as having an "agenda." We're not running some BuzzGitFeedLab mill here :) . I thought Andrew gave a wonderful presentation, and yes, we do use Pingdom as a tool to measure these things.

by rdslw 7y ago

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!

rdslw 7y ago
I did not write anything about author having/not having technical skills. You're reading it between lines, and in my opinion it shows (again: for me) kind of insecurity. I suspect that emphasis of 'being competitive for the positions we were hired' also shows it. But it's my opinion. What I wrote (and what I stand for) is that it is good to know that this article was written by 'content marketer' - meaning person with a SPECIFIC agenda for writing that article (by definition of 'content marketing' itself). Thats always good to know. If anybody praises something I always prefer to know if there is something (e.g. salary?) which may created/influenced/PAID such opinion. We (hackernews) derided it on many ocassions. To give different example: I personally ask all bankers if they have commission on me (for specific recommended product), or not. And I consider it healthy to know and ask. To make it clear, I think that there is a good content marketing, and that there is a a bad content marketing. The bad for example can be seen easily with searching google for "blog 10 best sleeeping bags" and similar.
- cbuchanan 7y ago
  Hi, the content marketer here. I'm just quoting the presentation we gave at Google Cloud Next '19 almost exactly. Instead of making you watch a 30+ minute video, I outlined the core points from the presentation so that you could still be in the loop. While I don't take offense to your comment, I think you made it for a reason. It's an ad hominem fallacy. These are our staff engineer's words almost to the letter, if I had posted it in his name would you have taken it at face value? I think it's important for us to ask these questions of ourselves and analyze why we form certain opinions. That said, I do appreciate the feedback, and thank you for your comments. I'll try to keep your opinions in mind with future posts as I certainly never want to come off as having an "agenda." We're not running some BuzzGitFeedLab mill here :) . I thought Andrew gave a wonderful presentation, and yes, we do use Pingdom as a tool to measure these things.