24 ms·

Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

848 points by andygcook 7y ago

sieabahlpark 7y ago
I don't see how it's worth that much unless their plan is to strip all features from gitlab community or expect a Google acquisition.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I mean, with GitHub's price being 7.5 billion, it's not outrageous as one of their leading competitors. I also was feeling like a Google acquisition wasn't impossible, they did move their entire platform to Google Cloud recently. Microsoft and Google seem on pretty good terms lately, but right now, a lot of Google's public projects are posted on a Microsoft code hosting platform. I could see a day where Google says they need their own, buys GitLab, and moves over everything.
  - ianlevesque 7y ago
    Why would they do that after shutting down Google Code?
    - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
      Google Code wasn't modern/competitive, seemingly had nobody working on it internally, didn't have a business model of any kind, etc. Why launch a new messaging service after shuttering... like ten of them? Just because a company shuts down a product doesn't mean they'll never want to have a product in that category again. Especially a company known for regularly having multiple overlapping products.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I'd love for Gitlab to stay independent. Of course that is risky and who am I to deny the founders a billion dollar windfall but I feel that such critical resources should not be acquired by the likes of Google, Amazon or Microsoft who already have much more power than they should have.
    - i_cant_speel 7y ago
      Unfortunately, the fact that you feel that way is exactly why it's a good decision for Google or Amazon to buy them.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        The other side hopefully gets a say in that as well. Either way, I'd have peace with it, that's just my personal preference.
    - emilycook 7y ago
      Hi! GitLab employee, our plan is to go public by 2020 [1][2]. I trust Sid our CEO to stay transparent about this (worked with him personally, this isn't just blind company loyalty lol), and he does a company-wide AMA very frequently where he talks about going public. So I think we will stay independent, or at least won't get acquired easily. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ [2] https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#goals https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#goals
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Hi Emily, I've been following the Gitlab saga from reasonably close by (I'm Dutch), if and when you go public you can count on me buying a substantial number of shares just to put my Euros where my mouth is. Best of luck to all of you.
        emilycook 7y ago
        Yay! Glad to hear that :)
  - arunc 7y ago
    > a lot of Google's public projects are posted on a Microsoft code hosting platform Curious to know what that platform is.
    - umeshunni 7y ago
      GitHub
    - mcintyre1994 7y ago
      Github?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  Oh it'll get acquired eventually, the question is when, and at what price, and by whom? How valuable is a Github competitor if nobody's leaving Github to use it? I don't see Google being interested; they know it won't make any money but from corporate users, and corporate users don't take Google Cloud seriously. Someone like Atlassian might be interested if they didn't already have 5 CI/CD solutions.
  - auiya 7y ago
    I'd submit most of the bigger players could (and probably have) simply build their own comparable versioning system for cheaper.
cj 7y ago
Question to current Gitlab users: Why do you use Gitlab instead of Github? What are the killer features that make it worth switching to?
- jdcaron 7y ago
  It's open source and extensible.
- camjohnson26 7y ago
  Private Repos by default, not owned by Microsoft, alternative to the established player, built in CI features.
- trumbitta2 7y ago
  The "Create merge request" (from issue) button. It creates a new branch, with a smart name like 123-my-issue-title, and a new "pull request" for that issue and branch.
  - willis936 7y ago
    This sounds similar to Atlassian’s Jira/Bitbucket integration without the jira.
    - ndarwincorn 7y ago
      GitLab's value prop can be more or less summed up as 'everyone else gives you ala carte tools, we give you one that's unified'.
  - galacticdessert 7y ago
    Agree. This is indeed a nice tidy workflow. I usually just create a bunch of issues to have a visual representation of what is missing in a project, sort them in a board and then work through them. Issues are good place for asking input and feedback, and also help in keeping feature branches focused and short lived. Definitely my favorite git workflow.
  - veritas3241 7y ago
boldslogan 7y ago
A cool part from the article >> part of a shadow program in which employees spend two weeks sitting in on their CEO’s meetings, feedback sessions and media or analyst calls Does anyone know of companies that do this "internship" / shadowing / mentoring built into the company?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  We are nowhere near as valuable or successful as Gitlab but we also practice radical transparency, which means that all of our material conversations happen out in the open. This saves a lot of time and makes it much easier to stay on top of what is happening. Because many of our co-workers are remote we publish a once-per-month update that goes into substantial detail about the state of the business. I'm a firm believe that companies should be run like that but many other founders like to play their cards much closer to their chests.
  - dpflan 7y ago
    Interesting. Who is "we" (which company)?
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      The Modular Company, a small group of people providing technical due diligence services to VC and PE.
- ecbrinkman 7y ago
  Thanks for highlighting this! I was lucky enough to get to be the shadow this week, and it's been an incredible experience. The program is outlined in our handbook if you want to find out more info: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/
  - boldslogan 7y ago
    Ah from the handbook You are eligible to apply for the program if you have accepted an offer at GitLab as a: Director or up, Distinguished engineer or up, or Senior product manager or up. Manager or Staff engineer, if there is 1 consideration. Individual Contributor, if there are 2 considerations. I was thinking more like olden times where you work your way up from the delivery boy spot or something and this was a chance to do it. Maybe I misunderstood?
dpflan 7y ago
I am curious how the Gitlab is so valuable. I've never used the service, but HN posts keep me informed superficially. Could someone explain the valuation?
- snarf21 7y ago
  Microsoft bought Github for $7.5B so it gives them a great comparable.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Wouldn't that put them at 40% of github's value. Giving that github's brand is more valuable this is pie-in-the-sky vc math. Ready to be ipoed and written down to a 1/10 of the value in 2 years.
    - snarf21 7y ago
      I think both valuations are too high but there it is. Enterprise is hot right now and some people are anti-MS. Also, Gitlab allows on prem which is a huge issue for some orgs. Also, it seems that Gitlab's all remote teams have a much lower cost structure and will allow for easier profitability. I guess we'll see.
      - 0xffff2 7y ago
        Github also has on prem offerings.
        snarf21 7y ago
        I stand corrected. Historically they didn't.
        dubcanada 7y ago
        GitHub was on prem before gitlab was even a ruby application. Not sure what you mean exactly.
alexis_fr 7y ago
Is it related to Atlassian’s huge price increase (40% to 320%) for Server licenses? They try to push everyone to the cloud, almost by force. It made the stock (NASDAQ:TEAM) lose about 16% in 20 days. https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Atlassian+Price+Increase+October+2019 https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Atlassian+P...
dcchambers 7y ago
Does Gitlab release user statistics? I am curious to know how many active users they have.
- YorickPeterse 7y ago
  As far as I know we don't have any recurring reports on data like this, though I think we may have mentioned it in the odd blog post in the past.
djdjrjdjxajwn 7y ago
Wow all that Hacker News astroturfing is really paying off!
- temptemptemp111 7y ago
  Yep. How professional devops people can think running chef in docker (what GitLab does) is beyond me.
pm90 7y ago
Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub support is fucking horrible. It’s insanely bad, even for paying enterprise customers. Open a support ticket, you will get some superficial pointers to documentation, and then be completely ignored. Their Product team is the absolute worst too. There are so many things that can make life easier for users (better configurability for CODEOWNERS notification?) and they will flat out ignore you. Gitlab on the other hand seem much more responsive to users... their actions speak volumes. They recognized the need for integrated CI/CD with code and instead of stealing TravisCIs ideas (cough GitHub Actions Cough), they built one years ago. I really do hope they grow to be the tool of choice for devs. GitHub has lost its way: from being the place that devs loved, to a corporate soul sucking behemoth made of a seemingly insensitive product team. Gitlab on the other hand, release new features, have better support, give interesting talks etc. Very excited to see where they go and I wish them the very best.
- aeonflux 7y ago
  I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I should just FO.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    That's a terrible process. As you say, a "soft lock" of some kind is the obvious fix. They are basically encouraging you to jump ship because at that point, it's a similar effort to move to another vendor.
  - en-us 7y ago
    IMO at that point since you have to rebuild everything anyway, just rebuild it with a different vendor. No reason to stay with a company that treats you like that.
ko3us 7y ago
We’ve been using Gitlab for 4 years now. What got us initially was the free private repos before github had that. We are now a paying customer. Their integrated CICD is amazing. It works perfectly for all our needs and integrates really easily with AWS and GCP. Also their customer service is really damn good. If I ever have an issue, it’s dealt with so fast and with so much detail. Honestly one of the best customer service I’ve experienced. Their product is feature rich, priced right and is easy. I’m amazed at how the operate. Kudos to the team
- umvi 7y ago
  > Their integrated CICD is amazing. My company switched to BitBucket in order to pinch pennies, and now I weep when I have to get Jenkins and BitBucket to play nice with each other or to do something. GitLab CI just works, is easily horizontally scalable without paying exorbitant prices for more "agents", etc... I miss GitLab...
  - toong 7y ago
    Jenkinsfile + BitBucket works just nicely here. Getting that to work with GitHub is more painful (pain mostly related to automated webhook-management) I can't compare to GitLab right now ;-)
    - umvi 7y ago
      Are you using any of the paid Jenkins plugins in the Atlassian Marketplace? Does BitBucket show CI build status on PRs? Can you retry builds from BitBucket or do you have to visit Jenkins dashboard to retry a build? (Just curious, we recently switched, and I'm finding Jenkins to have a much steeper learning curve than GitLab CI had)
      - beilabs 7y ago
        Using all free plugins in our place. There is a free bitbucket status notifier that will update the CI build status on a branch / PR. You have to retry via the Jenkins dashboard.
kimjongtrill 7y ago
kind of wish they had kept it a little more lightweight. been running v7.10.5 as a personal repo on a small-ish sized vps. went to upgrade/migrate to a newer version the other day and the recent versions crash out on the same host configuration. i eventually got it up and running but it was sluggish and nearly unusable. sticking with v7.10.5 for now but i will probably switch to gogs or something similar soon.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  Sluggish and nearly unusable describes every experience I have ever had with GitLab.
  - dsumenkovic 7y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. We are working hard to improve performance and memory consumption of GitLab. We have two major projects underway, switching to Puma [1] as well as reducing the overall memory consumption of GitLab [2]. You can follow along on some of the progress we are making in each release post in the "Performance Improvements" section. For 12.2 you can see we had 58 MR's related to performance. [1] - https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html [2] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/memory/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/en... [3] - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=&state=merged&label_name%5B%5D=performance&milestone_title=12.2 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=...
    - stevekemp 7y ago
      I've heard this from gitlab employees before. Every. Single. Release. For. The. Past. Two. Years. At some point it seems clear that despite statements to the contrary the speed of the instance, and the resource consumption just cannot be a concern. I'd rather the core was speedy and resource-appropriate than see additional half-working features bolted on non-stop, while bug reports languish.
dijit 7y ago
While my org uses perforce extensively; we also have a gitlab premium license (with far too many seats than we have users due to a fuck-up deploying mattermost org wide then promptly disbanding the effort after the damage was done) which we use enjoyably. Despite the fact the people who host our gitlab internal do not update it often or support it well I do think it’s a great product at the enterprise level. So much so that I host one myself for my IRC community to use! Glad it’s working out for them.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  what happened with the MM deploy ooi?
  - dijit 7y ago
    Microsoft came and gave us teams “for free”. And since we’d tied mattermost to gitlab, every mattermost user (non-developer) was (is) costing us money. :/
keithwhor 7y ago
Congrats, GitLab team. Way to build an impressive business. When anybody tells you there are rules to venture capital — like it’s impossible to take on massive incumbents that have network effects — ignore them. The GitLab team is doing something phenomenal here. Enjoy your success! You’ve earned it.
- sytse 7y ago
  Thank you! GitHub is unchallenged in open source but it turns out you can change all the people in one company to a new tool without much of a problem, especially if you can replace 10 other tools.
exabrial 7y ago
Github long ago realized how unprofitable support is when you have a monopoly. Glad to see GitLab carving up a market segment.
- jansan 7y ago
  I thought the Github support department is called "Stackoverflow".
petercooper 7y ago
Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source projects? I have no horse in the race (indeed, I'd love for there to be more variety in this space) but one of my jobs is to link to open source repos and I've just checked.. and the last one I linked to was in December 2018. In the niches I cover, almost no-one seems to actually using GitLab for their open source repos. Lest you think it's just me, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitlab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitlab.com .. the first is packed with projects posted here on a daily basis. The latter? 13 project links in about 50 days.
- madamelic 7y ago
  Corporate usage. GitHub is the standard so pretty much everyone has a GitHub account, companies ask for GitHub accounts on applications, it's the hub currently. GitLab is the superior product in all regards, but GitHub has the network.
  - badrequest 7y ago
    When I was applying for jobs recently, a few of them had explicit GitHub link fields, sometimes even regex validated to ensure ONLY GitHub links got posted. I didn't finish filling out those applications.
    - fogs 7y ago
      Echoing that. I was looking for several jobs as a senior dev. 15 years of work experience in corp. environments do not necessarily result in much GitHub activity -- I discarded every opening that required linking your private repo.
  - ksec 7y ago
    >GitLab is the superior product in all regards, but GitHub has the network. I could agree on features, but not UX. Github is still the king.
benj111 7y ago
I like how, considering all the wework shenanigans, they just unquestioningly report a doubling in another unicorns value.
KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
Please give gitlab some more money so they can enhance development. My experience with gitlab has not been the best. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20923559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20923559 But congrats to the team too. It's good to see another startup succeeding for delivering real value.
harrisonjackson 7y ago
I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd. The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never had any issues with it. My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment variables from ci logs is not sufficient. It won't match + scrub aws secret keys in the logs, which seems like a pretty glaring problem in a cicd setup. > masked so they are hidden in job logs, though they must match certain regexp requirements to do so We've been able to work around it, but it did make that particular automation more difficult.
- jl-gitlab 7y ago
  Hey, CI/CD PM here. I'd love to learn more about how you're using GitLab for mobile, if you're up for it ping me at @jlenny on gitlab.com. It's an area of focus for us, and it's always great to get to know another person who is using that use case.
  - harrisonjackson 7y ago
    We use it with Fastlane to automate our entire build and delivery pipeline. We set it up for our mobile clients, too, and it saves us a lot of time getting code shipped quickly. We have a Mojave VM configured with Xcode, Fastlane, and the gitlab runner. We automate uploads to Appetize.io for every feature branch so that QA and clients can test out new features in a simulator running in the browser. We automate builds and uploads to Apple test flight and Google playstore alpha tracks on our develop branch. The gitlab runner is by far the most reliable and easiest to setup part of the whole deal with the worst being maybe cocoapods or npm for the projects that rely on them (react-native). I'll ping you on gitlab. Happy to go into more detail!
    - orf 7y ago
      > react-native We've recently run into an issue with building react-native on Gitlab-CI, where apparently the build process spins up a file watcher in the background which quickly exhausts the open file descriptors. Have you experienced anything like this? We are using stock react-native and not customizing anything.
timwayne16 7y ago
I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd. The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never had any issues with it. My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment variables from ci logs is not sufficient. It won't match + scrub aws secret keys in the logs, which seems like a pretty glaring problem in a cicd setup.
ltbarcly3 7y ago
I just want to address 'valuation' quickly for people who may not be familiar with how this is made up. Lets say I have a peanut cart, and in my sack I have 10,000 peanuts. Some sucker comes along and invests in the peanut cart, and I sell him 1 peanut's worth of the cart for $1.00. By the usual rules of 'valuation', the valuation of my sack of peanuts is now $10,000.00. Valuation just means what someone somewhere estimates the value to be, it doesn't have to be credible. It becomes more significant when investments are made, since if an investor puts in money at a valuation of X, they are betting that the company will find liquidity at some point in the future with a valuation greater than X, or the investor will lose money (even this is not true, since they will likely have liquidation preference or other backstops to protect themselves at the expense of founders and employees). The short version is, valuation is not what the company is actually worth, or even an impartial estimate or appraisal. It is purely the amount invested divided by the fraction of the company that investment purchased (even if the fraction is small), and it ignores things like liquidation preference that let investors hedge risk when they invest money at valuations that make no sense.
- zrail 7y ago
  Yes. All of that said, if you're an insider with equity you'll have access to a 409A valuation, which does take all of that into account when coming up with the number. It's closer to what the market will pay for common stock in a theoretical IPO at the time of valuation. It's definitely not in any way what the market will actually pay in a real IPO.
  - ltbarcly3 7y ago
    It's closer, being less, but too often $0 is closer still!
vvram 7y ago
Well deserved ! Kudos to the team, staying true to their Vision and execution.
ryanmcbride 7y ago
At my last job Gitlab was in the stack and I had never used it before so I was expecting it to be a real pain. It was actually a perfectly pleasant experience. I don't think it'll make me leave Github but I put them at the same level now. Merge Requests never felt right saying over Pull Requests, even though it's more descriptive of what's actually happening.
- banachtarski 7y ago
  I'm being pedantic here, but the reason I prefer pull is because it feels more general than a "merge," which to me precludes a fetch/rebase. I guess you could consider it a merge -ff-only, but in a mergeless-master workflow, "merge request" felt awkward.
  - auspex 7y ago
    I agree with you here. The git repo "pulls" changes from a remote instance/branch and then merges the changes.
  - ryanmcbride 7y ago
    That makes a lot of sense
  - Nimitz14 7y ago
    But it's wrong. It's actually a "push" instead of "pull", the direction is away from what you're doing not towards you!
    - banachtarski 7y ago
      It’s a pull “request,” i.e. a request for someone else to pull your changes. I don’t follow your argument.
      - Nimitz14 7y ago
        Or viewed from another perspective (the person initiating) a request for someone else to accept the changes you are pushing.
johnapridonidze 7y ago
wow
NicoJuicy 7y ago
Is Sytse on vacation? It's the first time I don't see a response from him :p
- deskamess 7y ago
  Possibly SEC rules and/or advice from lawyers to only say anything when needed - they are at or getting to a critical point in the journey. The PR/support staff can run the comments for now.
  - sytse 7y ago
    Funding secured.
- pokstad 7y ago
  Busy today: https://gitlabcommit2019brooklyn.sched.com/directory/speakers https://gitlabcommit2019brooklyn.sched.com/directory/speaker...
- emilycook 7y ago
  GitLab employee, pokstad is correct he's at GitLab Commit today! We're passing along stuff we think he might be interested in though ️:P
BillowyFungus 7y ago
Gitlab is
NewbyCoderrr 7y ago
I would die for Gitlab. Such a great tool.
factorialboy 7y ago
Original announcement: https://about.gitlab.com/2019/09/17/gitlab-series-e-funding/ https://about.gitlab.com/2019/09/17/gitlab-series-e-funding/
preommr 7y ago
I still don't understand how github was worth 7+ billion.
asdkhadsj 7y ago
Related question. Is it possible to use Gitlab CI with a runner running on your own hardware to get unlimited CI time? I'd like to take a machine at my home and use it to run automated tests/etc, especially because some of the integration tests can be quite long (ie, chewing up CI minutes). I thought this was possible, but after searching I was often confused. I imagine I'm using poor terms during my search. Thoughts?
- jtwaleson 7y ago
  Yes, have been doing this for a year in autoscaling configuration on gitlab.com Edit: see https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/docker_machine.html https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/docker_machine.html
- tortasaur 7y ago
  I'm not sure about gitlab.com, but you could always run a self-hosted instance.
- dkns 7y ago
  It absolutely is. That's what we do at company I work for. We use free gitlab mintues and when it runs out we use runner running on one of our own local machines.
- n42 7y ago
  You can also do this with Buildkite without having to drag along the rest of the cruft that is GitLab. It’s free for individuals, if I recall. Buildkite is an excellent CI tool.
- boleary-gl 7y ago
  GitLab employee here. Yes - if you bring your own runner to GitLab.com you can run unlimited build minutes on it - the build minutes we count are only those on our shared compute (2000 minutes for free, etc.). The other huge benefit is that you can put that runner behind your firewall without poking any holes - itbjust needs access to GitLab.com and it can run your builds.
- mcintyre1994 7y ago
jonbronson 7y ago
Still waiting on better monorepo support in GitLab.
- emilycook 7y ago
  Hi! Better support for monorepos is in our roadmap, you can see our handbook entry here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integration/#monorepos-and-cross-project-pipelines https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integra... and the relevant epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/915 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/915
gmiller123456 7y ago
Silly question: What are "CI pipeline minutes"? I read their FAQ which just says it's minutes used on their "runners", which only changes the question to "What are runners, and where do they fit in?" I figured out CI means Continuous Integration, which is something I don't use, nor want to. I'm mainly just interested to know if this comes in to play if I just want to use GitLab to publicly share code like on Github.
- spike021 7y ago
  Just an assumption, but maybe the time each stage/step takes? Maybe there are improvements that can be made to Gitlab to speed them up, or something to that affect. (I don't know the specifics so this is completely a guess)
- _ikke_ 7y ago
  The runner is the piece of software that executes pipelines. You can install it on any machine and connect that to a gitlab instance. On hosted gitlab, they provide the runners, but limit how long you can these runners execute, which they measure in minutes.
- HeavyStorm 7y ago
  Entirely optional. You can just use it for code, connect your own CI/CD or use theirs.
- HeavyStorm 7y ago
  But I am curious... Why wouldn't you want to use a CI?
  - gmiller123456 7y ago
    For anything I'd put on Git*b, it's largely unnecessary, as they'd just be tiny pet projects that only I would ever update. I'm surprised when I even get someone looking at my repos, let alone contributing to them.
- codyb 7y ago
  I assume, not an expert here, that GitLab’s runners spin up when you make a push that triggers a build. I’ve set up my own pipeline with Jenkins, Docker Registry, and Gitea and when I push a change to Gitea, a hook is called in Jenkins which starts executing relatively simple bash scripts for building images, pushing them into the Docker Registry, fetching them on my server, and restarting them. Runners are almost certainly the equivalent of Jenkins here. A hook is called, and Gitlab’s runner starts executing some script to build images and assets, and deploys them for you. If you add in tests things can probably get pricey. But I bet you can have multiple runners building different parts of your system in parallel which is why their by the minute charging scheme makes sense (as opposed to number of runners required per build or something). And it seems fair to charge you a combined total of ten minutes of processing time for two parallel runners, one of which started at the 0th second and ran for one minute and one which started and ran for 9 minutes. If you don’t use it now, it can be a lot of initial work to set up, but watching your CI/CD pipeline chug along and deploy your work can be really really satisfying. Was definitely overkill for my personal home page but really enjoyable to build and have it come together.
RivieraKid 7y ago
Why so much? I would guess that you should be able to build this from scratch for something like 1% of that valuation.
- amelius 7y ago
  My guess too. I'm almost tempted to start coding :)
pepemon 7y ago
Well maybe they will either backport or accept community implementation of merge request approval functionality now [1]. With all kudos to the GitLab team, absence of this feature while all other major players free tiers have it is quite a nonsense. Anyway, GitLab is really solid platform with pleasant OOBE. Always recommend it to anyone. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/20696 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/20696
JalisRahat 7y ago
We are Gitlab customers since 2019 and I can tell you that your expectations for what support can do for you are very unrealistic.
cfv 7y ago
How does this even work? Like, does one plainly submit a form to the govt saying "yeah just double it" or what? I never actually got the hang of how this things are defined; can anyone ELI5?
- jdoliner 7y ago
  It occurs as part of a fundraising process in which an investor invests money at a valuation that's double the previous one. As part of that there are forms filed that effectively say: "yeah just double it" but you don't file this forms outside of a fundraising process.
lswainemoore 7y ago
Gitlab is great! Most major downside from my perspective is that the diffing functionality is much worse than Github's. Super slow + resource intensive.
- emilycook 7y ago
  Hi! GitLab employee, we have an epic open here to improve diff performance: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1816 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1816
  - lswainemoore 7y ago
    Thanks! Glad to hear it. I will be an especially happy camper if this means that file folding works efficiently.
mlindner 7y ago
I honestly hate gitlab compared to github. So many broken features and half implemented things. It's got all the same problems Jira has (as compared to GitHub which is amazing to use).
- emilycook 7y ago
  Hi, GitLab employee here. Sorry to hear that! This funding should enable us to throw more resources at maturing some of our features (e.g. we tripled our employee count this year). We spun up this product maturity page to make this a little more transparent: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/
  - mlindner 7y ago
    Can you please fix in-line commenting? I should be able to click and drag several lines and leave a comment on those several lines specifically. This is something everything from reviewboard to github have had for ages but gitlab still doesn't have. Additionally, gitlab defaults to lots of files not showing their contents in the diff which is extremely frustrating as I need to go click several times to enable the diff.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ta478447guu 7y ago
They seem to have achieved golden child status on HN, and from my experiences its hard to see why. Glad there's a non-Microsoft option, but I wish it were another whole setup. Support is non-existent, clunky CI infrastructure, barebones all over. They seem to just be good at reacting in public threads.
- irq11 7y ago
  The excitement for gitlab on HN has always been a combination of “open source enthusiasm” and astroturfing. From personal experience, HN is filled with tire-kickers who will hug the crap out of any halfway-usable product that they can “migrate to” for free (and abandon said product as soon as a payment form appears). It’s a misleading signal. Even on this thread, you can count on one hand the number of commenters who actually say they pay to use the product. The trick is to use that noise to leverage yourself into markets where people actually pay money for things.
  - meddlepal 7y ago
    Someone should make a website of failed technologies and companies HN positively adored complete with gushing comment quotes about how awesome and disruptive said thing will be.
  - joshlambert 7y ago
    The breakdown is probably close to the percentage of paying versus open source customers that we have. We are working to better educate our users on the value that our paid version can offer, but it is very important for us to be good stewards of the open source community that has grown around the project. You can read more about our pricing strategy and stewardship here: https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-are-paid-only https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-... On the revenue side, Sid publicly shared an update recently: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1156571842653478913?s=21 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1156571842653478913?s=21
    - irq11 7y ago
iagooar 7y ago
It's a shame they sold out so quickly to US investors (I think they are even officially incorporated in the US now?). They could have become Europe's largest software company, instead they chose to follow the money. To be fair, I guess significant European investment is still hard to come by these days.
cityzen 7y ago
Honest question from someone that knows nothing about valuations, does this seem kind of ridiculous? Aside from investors basically making this stuff up, is there any actual validity to a billion dollar valuation anymore? What would I look at (aside from %s) that would show me, someone that knows nothing about finance, that this company is this valuable? What is their actual revenue? I’m mostly curious to see how reality stacks up against hope and what the actual financial outcome of this would be outside of seeming like these companies are being dumped on the market for a big payout.
nl 7y ago
its annualized revenue is growing at a rate of 143% year-to-year, with net retention of customer spending at 153%. Net dollar retention is the metric anyone judging a SAAS business should be looking at. 153% is nearly the best I've ever seen - Twilio was 155%, Slack 140% at IPO[1], Sendgrid 115%, Mulesoft 117%[2] [1] https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-lines/ https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-lines/ [2] https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-retention/ https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-retention/
larryyangsen 7y ago
We use gitlab.com with drone CICD.
OrgNet 7y ago
triple it... and gimme 20k, only.
mariogintili 7y ago
awww it seemed like yesterday when they accidentally dropped their prod db
sam1r 7y ago
Confirming I have used GitLab across 10 different domains/entities/projects & have had zero issues. IMO... both GH + GL are here to stay. Here's how I evaluate how to use for each one. => GitHub = OSS street cred. [You might want to get hired or want to showcase your skills] => GitLab = Business/Enterprise related. [You might want to earn $/make a living... you know.. following your countries' compliancy] FWIW...My two cents...Both great products, however, different use cases.
- nscalf 7y ago
  Totally agree with this, I think a lot of it stems from Github getting open source code in early and Gitlab having free private repos. I use Gitlab because of that. All of the open source work I did is done through Github. Ultimately, I'm glad they both exist, my go to is Gitlab though. And I'll be looking closely at their IPO to be an investor.

848 points by andygcook 7y ago

I don't see how it's worth that much unless their plan is to strip all features from gitlab community or expect a Google acquisition.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I mean, with GitHub's price being 7.5 billion, it's not outrageous as one of their leading competitors. I also was feeling like a Google acquisition wasn't impossible, they did move their entire platform to Google Cloud recently. Microsoft and Google seem on pretty good terms lately, but right now, a lot of Google's public projects are posted on a Microsoft code hosting platform. I could see a day where Google says they need their own, buys GitLab, and moves over everything.
- ianlevesque 7y ago
  Why would they do that after shutting down Google Code?
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    Google Code wasn't modern/competitive, seemingly had nobody working on it internally, didn't have a business model of any kind, etc. Why launch a new messaging service after shuttering... like ten of them? Just because a company shuts down a product doesn't mean they'll never want to have a product in that category again. Especially a company known for regularly having multiple overlapping products.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I'd love for Gitlab to stay independent. Of course that is risky and who am I to deny the founders a billion dollar windfall but I feel that such critical resources should not be acquired by the likes of Google, Amazon or Microsoft who already have much more power than they should have.
  - i_cant_speel 7y ago
    Unfortunately, the fact that you feel that way is exactly why it's a good decision for Google or Amazon to buy them.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      The other side hopefully gets a say in that as well. Either way, I'd have peace with it, that's just my personal preference.
  - emilycook 7y ago
    Hi! GitLab employee, our plan is to go public by 2020 [1][2]. I trust Sid our CEO to stay transparent about this (worked with him personally, this isn't just blind company loyalty lol), and he does a company-wide AMA very frequently where he talks about going public. So I think we will stay independent, or at least won't get acquired easily. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/ [2] https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#goals https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#goals
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Hi Emily, I've been following the Gitlab saga from reasonably close by (I'm Dutch), if and when you go public you can count on me buying a substantial number of shares just to put my Euros where my mouth is. Best of luck to all of you.
      - emilycook 7y ago
        Yay! Glad to hear that :)
- arunc 7y ago
  > a lot of Google's public projects are posted on a Microsoft code hosting platform Curious to know what that platform is.
  - umeshunni 7y ago
    GitHub
  - mcintyre1994 7y ago
    Github?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
peterwwillis 7y ago
Oh it'll get acquired eventually, the question is when, and at what price, and by whom? How valuable is a Github competitor if nobody's leaving Github to use it? I don't see Google being interested; they know it won't make any money but from corporate users, and corporate users don't take Google Cloud seriously. Someone like Atlassian might be interested if they didn't already have 5 CI/CD solutions.
- auiya 7y ago
  I'd submit most of the bigger players could (and probably have) simply build their own comparable versioning system for cheaper.

cj 7y ago

Question to current Gitlab users: Why do you use Gitlab instead of Github? What are the killer features that make it worth switching to?

jdcaron 7y ago
It's open source and extensible.
camjohnson26 7y ago
Private Repos by default, not owned by Microsoft, alternative to the established player, built in CI features.
trumbitta2 7y ago
The "Create merge request" (from issue) button. It creates a new branch, with a smart name like 123-my-issue-title, and a new "pull request" for that issue and branch.
- willis936 7y ago
  This sounds similar to Atlassian’s Jira/Bitbucket integration without the jira.
  - ndarwincorn 7y ago
    GitLab's value prop can be more or less summed up as 'everyone else gives you ala carte tools, we give you one that's unified'.
- galacticdessert 7y ago
  Agree. This is indeed a nice tidy workflow. I usually just create a bunch of issues to have a visual representation of what is missing in a project, sort them in a board and then work through them. Issues are good place for asking input and feedback, and also help in keeping feature branches focused and short lived. Definitely my favorite git workflow.
- veritas3241 7y ago

boldslogan 7y ago

A cool part from the article >> part of a shadow program in which employees spend two weeks sitting in on their CEO’s meetings, feedback sessions and media or analyst calls Does anyone know of companies that do this "internship" / shadowing / mentoring built into the company?

jacquesm 7y ago
We are nowhere near as valuable or successful as Gitlab but we also practice radical transparency, which means that all of our material conversations happen out in the open. This saves a lot of time and makes it much easier to stay on top of what is happening. Because many of our co-workers are remote we publish a once-per-month update that goes into substantial detail about the state of the business. I'm a firm believe that companies should be run like that but many other founders like to play their cards much closer to their chests.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Interesting. Who is "we" (which company)?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    The Modular Company, a small group of people providing technical due diligence services to VC and PE.
ecbrinkman 7y ago
Thanks for highlighting this! I was lucky enough to get to be the shadow this week, and it's been an incredible experience. The program is outlined in our handbook if you want to find out more info: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/
- boldslogan 7y ago
  Ah from the handbook You are eligible to apply for the program if you have accepted an offer at GitLab as a: Director or up, Distinguished engineer or up, or Senior product manager or up. Manager or Staff engineer, if there is 1 consideration. Individual Contributor, if there are 2 considerations. I was thinking more like olden times where you work your way up from the delivery boy spot or something and this was a chance to do it. Maybe I misunderstood?

dpflan 7y ago

I am curious how the Gitlab is so valuable. I've never used the service, but HN posts keep me informed superficially. Could someone explain the valuation?

snarf21 7y ago
Microsoft bought Github for $7.5B so it gives them a great comparable.
- wolco 7y ago
  Wouldn't that put them at 40% of github's value. Giving that github's brand is more valuable this is pie-in-the-sky vc math. Ready to be ipoed and written down to a 1/10 of the value in 2 years.
  - snarf21 7y ago
    I think both valuations are too high but there it is. Enterprise is hot right now and some people are anti-MS. Also, Gitlab allows on prem which is a huge issue for some orgs. Also, it seems that Gitlab's all remote teams have a much lower cost structure and will allow for easier profitability. I guess we'll see.
    - 0xffff2 7y ago
      Github also has on prem offerings.
      - snarf21 7y ago
        I stand corrected. Historically they didn't.
        dubcanada 7y ago
        GitHub was on prem before gitlab was even a ruby application. Not sure what you mean exactly.

alexis_fr 7y ago

Is it related to Atlassian’s huge price increase (40% to 320%) for Server licenses? They try to push everyone to the cloud, almost by force. It made the stock (NASDAQ:TEAM) lose about 16% in 20 days. https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Atlassian+Price+Increase+October+2019 https://info.seibert-media.net/display/Atlassian/Atlassian+P...

dcchambers 7y ago

Does Gitlab release user statistics? I am curious to know how many active users they have.

YorickPeterse 7y ago
As far as I know we don't have any recurring reports on data like this, though I think we may have mentioned it in the odd blog post in the past.

djdjrjdjxajwn 7y ago

Wow all that Hacker News astroturfing is really paying off!

temptemptemp111 7y ago
Yep. How professional devops people can think running chef in docker (what GitLab does) is beyond me.

pm90 7y ago

Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub support is fucking horrible. It’s insanely bad, even for paying enterprise customers. Open a support ticket, you will get some superficial pointers to documentation, and then be completely ignored. Their Product team is the absolute worst too. There are so many things that can make life easier for users (better configurability for CODEOWNERS notification?) and they will flat out ignore you. Gitlab on the other hand seem much more responsive to users... their actions speak volumes. They recognized the need for integrated CI/CD with code and instead of stealing TravisCIs ideas (cough GitHub Actions Cough), they built one years ago. I really do hope they grow to be the tool of choice for devs. GitHub has lost its way: from being the place that devs loved, to a corporate soul sucking behemoth made of a seemingly insensitive product team. Gitlab on the other hand, release new features, have better support, give interesting talks etc. Very excited to see where they go and I wish them the very best.

aeonflux 7y ago
I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I should just FO.
- tyingq 7y ago
  That's a terrible process. As you say, a "soft lock" of some kind is the obvious fix. They are basically encouraging you to jump ship because at that point, it's a similar effort to move to another vendor.
- en-us 7y ago
  IMO at that point since you have to rebuild everything anyway, just rebuild it with a different vendor. No reason to stay with a company that treats you like that.

ko3us 7y ago

We’ve been using Gitlab for 4 years now. What got us initially was the free private repos before github had that. We are now a paying customer. Their integrated CICD is amazing. It works perfectly for all our needs and integrates really easily with AWS and GCP. Also their customer service is really damn good. If I ever have an issue, it’s dealt with so fast and with so much detail. Honestly one of the best customer service I’ve experienced. Their product is feature rich, priced right and is easy. I’m amazed at how the operate. Kudos to the team

umvi 7y ago
> Their integrated CICD is amazing. My company switched to BitBucket in order to pinch pennies, and now I weep when I have to get Jenkins and BitBucket to play nice with each other or to do something. GitLab CI just works, is easily horizontally scalable without paying exorbitant prices for more "agents", etc... I miss GitLab...
- toong 7y ago
  Jenkinsfile + BitBucket works just nicely here. Getting that to work with GitHub is more painful (pain mostly related to automated webhook-management) I can't compare to GitLab right now ;-)
  - umvi 7y ago
    Are you using any of the paid Jenkins plugins in the Atlassian Marketplace? Does BitBucket show CI build status on PRs? Can you retry builds from BitBucket or do you have to visit Jenkins dashboard to retry a build? (Just curious, we recently switched, and I'm finding Jenkins to have a much steeper learning curve than GitLab CI had)
    - beilabs 7y ago
      Using all free plugins in our place. There is a free bitbucket status notifier that will update the CI build status on a branch / PR. You have to retry via the Jenkins dashboard.

kimjongtrill 7y ago

kind of wish they had kept it a little more lightweight. been running v7.10.5 as a personal repo on a small-ish sized vps. went to upgrade/migrate to a newer version the other day and the recent versions crash out on the same host configuration. i eventually got it up and running but it was sluggish and nearly unusable. sticking with v7.10.5 for now but i will probably switch to gogs or something similar soon.

0xffff2 7y ago
Sluggish and nearly unusable describes every experience I have ever had with GitLab.
- dsumenkovic 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. We are working hard to improve performance and memory consumption of GitLab. We have two major projects underway, switching to Puma [1] as well as reducing the overall memory consumption of GitLab [2]. You can follow along on some of the progress we are making in each release post in the "Performance Improvements" section. For 12.2 you can see we had 58 MR's related to performance. [1] - https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html [2] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/enablement/memory/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/en... [3] - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=&state=merged&label_name%5B%5D=performance&milestone_title=12.2 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=...
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    I've heard this from gitlab employees before. Every. Single. Release. For. The. Past. Two. Years. At some point it seems clear that despite statements to the contrary the speed of the instance, and the resource consumption just cannot be a concern. I'd rather the core was speedy and resource-appropriate than see additional half-working features bolted on non-stop, while bug reports languish.

dijit 7y ago

While my org uses perforce extensively; we also have a gitlab premium license (with far too many seats than we have users due to a fuck-up deploying mattermost org wide then promptly disbanding the effort after the damage was done) which we use enjoyably. Despite the fact the people who host our gitlab internal do not update it often or support it well I do think it’s a great product at the enterprise level. So much so that I host one myself for my IRC community to use! Glad it’s working out for them.

Arathorn 7y ago
what happened with the MM deploy ooi?
- dijit 7y ago
  Microsoft came and gave us teams “for free”. And since we’d tied mattermost to gitlab, every mattermost user (non-developer) was (is) costing us money. :/

keithwhor 7y ago

Congrats, GitLab team. Way to build an impressive business. When anybody tells you there are rules to venture capital — like it’s impossible to take on massive incumbents that have network effects — ignore them. The GitLab team is doing something phenomenal here. Enjoy your success! You’ve earned it.

sytse 7y ago
Thank you! GitHub is unchallenged in open source but it turns out you can change all the people in one company to a new tool without much of a problem, especially if you can replace 10 other tools.

exabrial 7y ago

Github long ago realized how unprofitable support is when you have a monopoly. Glad to see GitLab carving up a market segment.

jansan 7y ago
I thought the Github support department is called "Stackoverflow".

petercooper 7y ago

Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source projects? I have no horse in the race (indeed, I'd love for there to be more variety in this space) but one of my jobs is to link to open source repos and I've just checked.. and the last one I linked to was in December 2018. In the niches I cover, almost no-one seems to actually using GitLab for their open source repos. Lest you think it's just me, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com to https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitlab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gitlab.com .. the first is packed with projects posted here on a daily basis. The latter? 13 project links in about 50 days.

madamelic 7y ago
Corporate usage. GitHub is the standard so pretty much everyone has a GitHub account, companies ask for GitHub accounts on applications, it's the hub currently. GitLab is the superior product in all regards, but GitHub has the network.
- badrequest 7y ago
  When I was applying for jobs recently, a few of them had explicit GitHub link fields, sometimes even regex validated to ensure ONLY GitHub links got posted. I didn't finish filling out those applications.
  - fogs 7y ago
    Echoing that. I was looking for several jobs as a senior dev. 15 years of work experience in corp. environments do not necessarily result in much GitHub activity -- I discarded every opening that required linking your private repo.
- ksec 7y ago
  >GitLab is the superior product in all regards, but GitHub has the network. I could agree on features, but not UX. Github is still the king.

benj111 7y ago

I like how, considering all the wework shenanigans, they just unquestioningly report a doubling in another unicorns value.

KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago

Please give gitlab some more money so they can enhance development. My experience with gitlab has not been the best. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20923559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20923559 But congrats to the team too. It's good to see another startup succeeding for delivering real value.

harrisonjackson 7y ago

I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd. The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never had any issues with it. My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment variables from ci logs is not sufficient. It won't match + scrub aws secret keys in the logs, which seems like a pretty glaring problem in a cicd setup. > masked so they are hidden in job logs, though they must match certain regexp requirements to do so We've been able to work around it, but it did make that particular automation more difficult.

jl-gitlab 7y ago
Hey, CI/CD PM here. I'd love to learn more about how you're using GitLab for mobile, if you're up for it ping me at @jlenny on gitlab.com. It's an area of focus for us, and it's always great to get to know another person who is using that use case.
- harrisonjackson 7y ago
  We use it with Fastlane to automate our entire build and delivery pipeline. We set it up for our mobile clients, too, and it saves us a lot of time getting code shipped quickly. We have a Mojave VM configured with Xcode, Fastlane, and the gitlab runner. We automate uploads to Appetize.io for every feature branch so that QA and clients can test out new features in a simulator running in the browser. We automate builds and uploads to Apple test flight and Google playstore alpha tracks on our develop branch. The gitlab runner is by far the most reliable and easiest to setup part of the whole deal with the worst being maybe cocoapods or npm for the projects that rely on them (react-native). I'll ping you on gitlab. Happy to go into more detail!
  - orf 7y ago
    > react-native We've recently run into an issue with building react-native on Gitlab-CI, where apparently the build process spins up a file watcher in the background which quickly exhausts the open file descriptors. Have you experienced anything like this? We are using stock react-native and not customizing anything.

timwayne16 7y ago

ltbarcly3 7y ago

I just want to address 'valuation' quickly for people who may not be familiar with how this is made up. Lets say I have a peanut cart, and in my sack I have 10,000 peanuts. Some sucker comes along and invests in the peanut cart, and I sell him 1 peanut's worth of the cart for $1.00. By the usual rules of 'valuation', the valuation of my sack of peanuts is now $10,000.00. Valuation just means what someone somewhere estimates the value to be, it doesn't have to be credible. It becomes more significant when investments are made, since if an investor puts in money at a valuation of X, they are betting that the company will find liquidity at some point in the future with a valuation greater than X, or the investor will lose money (even this is not true, since they will likely have liquidation preference or other backstops to protect themselves at the expense of founders and employees). The short version is, valuation is not what the company is actually worth, or even an impartial estimate or appraisal. It is purely the amount invested divided by the fraction of the company that investment purchased (even if the fraction is small), and it ignores things like liquidation preference that let investors hedge risk when they invest money at valuations that make no sense.

zrail 7y ago
Yes. All of that said, if you're an insider with equity you'll have access to a 409A valuation, which does take all of that into account when coming up with the number. It's closer to what the market will pay for common stock in a theoretical IPO at the time of valuation. It's definitely not in any way what the market will actually pay in a real IPO.
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  It's closer, being less, but too often $0 is closer still!

vvram 7y ago

Well deserved ! Kudos to the team, staying true to their Vision and execution.

ryanmcbride 7y ago

At my last job Gitlab was in the stack and I had never used it before so I was expecting it to be a real pain. It was actually a perfectly pleasant experience. I don't think it'll make me leave Github but I put them at the same level now. Merge Requests never felt right saying over Pull Requests, even though it's more descriptive of what's actually happening.

banachtarski 7y ago
I'm being pedantic here, but the reason I prefer pull is because it feels more general than a "merge," which to me precludes a fetch/rebase. I guess you could consider it a merge -ff-only, but in a mergeless-master workflow, "merge request" felt awkward.
- auspex 7y ago
  I agree with you here. The git repo "pulls" changes from a remote instance/branch and then merges the changes.
- ryanmcbride 7y ago
  That makes a lot of sense
- Nimitz14 7y ago
  But it's wrong. It's actually a "push" instead of "pull", the direction is away from what you're doing not towards you!
  - banachtarski 7y ago
    It’s a pull “request,” i.e. a request for someone else to pull your changes. I don’t follow your argument.
    - Nimitz14 7y ago
      Or viewed from another perspective (the person initiating) a request for someone else to accept the changes you are pushing.

johnapridonidze 7y ago

wow

NicoJuicy 7y ago

Is Sytse on vacation? It's the first time I don't see a response from him :p

deskamess 7y ago
Possibly SEC rules and/or advice from lawyers to only say anything when needed - they are at or getting to a critical point in the journey. The PR/support staff can run the comments for now.
- sytse 7y ago
  Funding secured.
pokstad 7y ago
Busy today: https://gitlabcommit2019brooklyn.sched.com/directory/speakers https://gitlabcommit2019brooklyn.sched.com/directory/speaker...
emilycook 7y ago
GitLab employee, pokstad is correct he's at GitLab Commit today! We're passing along stuff we think he might be interested in though ️:P

BillowyFungus 7y ago

Gitlab is

NewbyCoderrr 7y ago

I would die for Gitlab. Such a great tool.

factorialboy 7y ago

Original announcement: https://about.gitlab.com/2019/09/17/gitlab-series-e-funding/ https://about.gitlab.com/2019/09/17/gitlab-series-e-funding/

preommr 7y ago

I still don't understand how github was worth 7+ billion.

asdkhadsj 7y ago

Related question. Is it possible to use Gitlab CI with a runner running on your own hardware to get unlimited CI time? I'd like to take a machine at my home and use it to run automated tests/etc, especially because some of the integration tests can be quite long (ie, chewing up CI minutes). I thought this was possible, but after searching I was often confused. I imagine I'm using poor terms during my search. Thoughts?

jtwaleson 7y ago
Yes, have been doing this for a year in autoscaling configuration on gitlab.com Edit: see https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/docker_machine.html https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/docker_machine.html
tortasaur 7y ago
I'm not sure about gitlab.com, but you could always run a self-hosted instance.
dkns 7y ago
It absolutely is. That's what we do at company I work for. We use free gitlab mintues and when it runs out we use runner running on one of our own local machines.
n42 7y ago
You can also do this with Buildkite without having to drag along the rest of the cruft that is GitLab. It’s free for individuals, if I recall. Buildkite is an excellent CI tool.
boleary-gl 7y ago
GitLab employee here. Yes - if you bring your own runner to GitLab.com you can run unlimited build minutes on it - the build minutes we count are only those on our shared compute (2000 minutes for free, etc.). The other huge benefit is that you can put that runner behind your firewall without poking any holes - itbjust needs access to GitLab.com and it can run your builds.
mcintyre1994 7y ago

jonbronson 7y ago

Still waiting on better monorepo support in GitLab.

emilycook 7y ago
Hi! Better support for monorepos is in our roadmap, you can see our handbook entry here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integration/#monorepos-and-cross-project-pipelines https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/continuous_integra... and the relevant epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/915 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/915

gmiller123456 7y ago

Silly question: What are "CI pipeline minutes"? I read their FAQ which just says it's minutes used on their "runners", which only changes the question to "What are runners, and where do they fit in?" I figured out CI means Continuous Integration, which is something I don't use, nor want to. I'm mainly just interested to know if this comes in to play if I just want to use GitLab to publicly share code like on Github.

spike021 7y ago
Just an assumption, but maybe the time each stage/step takes? Maybe there are improvements that can be made to Gitlab to speed them up, or something to that affect. (I don't know the specifics so this is completely a guess)
_ikke_ 7y ago
The runner is the piece of software that executes pipelines. You can install it on any machine and connect that to a gitlab instance. On hosted gitlab, they provide the runners, but limit how long you can these runners execute, which they measure in minutes.
HeavyStorm 7y ago
Entirely optional. You can just use it for code, connect your own CI/CD or use theirs.
HeavyStorm 7y ago
But I am curious... Why wouldn't you want to use a CI?
- gmiller123456 7y ago
  For anything I'd put on Git*b, it's largely unnecessary, as they'd just be tiny pet projects that only I would ever update. I'm surprised when I even get someone looking at my repos, let alone contributing to them.
codyb 7y ago
I assume, not an expert here, that GitLab’s runners spin up when you make a push that triggers a build. I’ve set up my own pipeline with Jenkins, Docker Registry, and Gitea and when I push a change to Gitea, a hook is called in Jenkins which starts executing relatively simple bash scripts for building images, pushing them into the Docker Registry, fetching them on my server, and restarting them. Runners are almost certainly the equivalent of Jenkins here. A hook is called, and Gitlab’s runner starts executing some script to build images and assets, and deploys them for you. If you add in tests things can probably get pricey. But I bet you can have multiple runners building different parts of your system in parallel which is why their by the minute charging scheme makes sense (as opposed to number of runners required per build or something). And it seems fair to charge you a combined total of ten minutes of processing time for two parallel runners, one of which started at the 0th second and ran for one minute and one which started and ran for 9 minutes. If you don’t use it now, it can be a lot of initial work to set up, but watching your CI/CD pipeline chug along and deploy your work can be really really satisfying. Was definitely overkill for my personal home page but really enjoyable to build and have it come together.

RivieraKid 7y ago

Why so much? I would guess that you should be able to build this from scratch for something like 1% of that valuation.

amelius 7y ago
My guess too. I'm almost tempted to start coding :)

pepemon 7y ago

Well maybe they will either backport or accept community implementation of merge request approval functionality now [1]. With all kudos to the GitLab team, absence of this feature while all other major players free tiers have it is quite a nonsense. Anyway, GitLab is really solid platform with pleasant OOBE. Always recommend it to anyone. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/20696 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/20696

JalisRahat 7y ago

We are Gitlab customers since 2019 and I can tell you that your expectations for what support can do for you are very unrealistic.

cfv 7y ago

How does this even work? Like, does one plainly submit a form to the govt saying "yeah just double it" or what? I never actually got the hang of how this things are defined; can anyone ELI5?

jdoliner 7y ago
It occurs as part of a fundraising process in which an investor invests money at a valuation that's double the previous one. As part of that there are forms filed that effectively say: "yeah just double it" but you don't file this forms outside of a fundraising process.

lswainemoore 7y ago

Gitlab is great! Most major downside from my perspective is that the diffing functionality is much worse than Github's. Super slow + resource intensive.

emilycook 7y ago
Hi! GitLab employee, we have an epic open here to improve diff performance: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1816 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1816
- lswainemoore 7y ago
  Thanks! Glad to hear it. I will be an especially happy camper if this means that file folding works efficiently.

mlindner 7y ago

I honestly hate gitlab compared to github. So many broken features and half implemented things. It's got all the same problems Jira has (as compared to GitHub which is amazing to use).

emilycook 7y ago
Hi, GitLab employee here. Sorry to hear that! This funding should enable us to throw more resources at maturing some of our features (e.g. we tripled our employee count this year). We spun up this product maturity page to make this a little more transparent: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/
- mlindner 7y ago
  Can you please fix in-line commenting? I should be able to click and drag several lines and leave a comment on those several lines specifically. This is something everything from reviewboard to github have had for ages but gitlab still doesn't have. Additionally, gitlab defaults to lots of files not showing their contents in the diff which is extremely frustrating as I need to go click several times to enable the diff.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ta478447guu 7y ago

They seem to have achieved golden child status on HN, and from my experiences its hard to see why. Glad there's a non-Microsoft option, but I wish it were another whole setup. Support is non-existent, clunky CI infrastructure, barebones all over. They seem to just be good at reacting in public threads.

irq11 7y ago
The excitement for gitlab on HN has always been a combination of “open source enthusiasm” and astroturfing. From personal experience, HN is filled with tire-kickers who will hug the crap out of any halfway-usable product that they can “migrate to” for free (and abandon said product as soon as a payment form appears). It’s a misleading signal. Even on this thread, you can count on one hand the number of commenters who actually say they pay to use the product. The trick is to use that noise to leverage yourself into markets where people actually pay money for things.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  Someone should make a website of failed technologies and companies HN positively adored complete with gushing comment quotes about how awesome and disruptive said thing will be.
- joshlambert 7y ago
  The breakdown is probably close to the percentage of paying versus open source customers that we have. We are working to better educate our users on the value that our paid version can offer, but it is very important for us to be good stewards of the open source community that has grown around the project. You can read more about our pricing strategy and stewardship here: https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-are-paid-only https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-... On the revenue side, Sid publicly shared an update recently: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1156571842653478913?s=21 https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1156571842653478913?s=21
  - irq11 7y ago

iagooar 7y ago

It's a shame they sold out so quickly to US investors (I think they are even officially incorporated in the US now?). They could have become Europe's largest software company, instead they chose to follow the money. To be fair, I guess significant European investment is still hard to come by these days.

cityzen 7y ago

Honest question from someone that knows nothing about valuations, does this seem kind of ridiculous? Aside from investors basically making this stuff up, is there any actual validity to a billion dollar valuation anymore? What would I look at (aside from %s) that would show me, someone that knows nothing about finance, that this company is this valuable? What is their actual revenue? I’m mostly curious to see how reality stacks up against hope and what the actual financial outcome of this would be outside of seeming like these companies are being dumped on the market for a big payout.

nl 7y ago

its annualized revenue is growing at a rate of 143% year-to-year, with net retention of customer spending at 153%. Net dollar retention is the metric anyone judging a SAAS business should be looking at. 153% is nearly the best I've ever seen - Twilio was 155%, Slack 140% at IPO[1], Sendgrid 115%, Mulesoft 117%[2] [1] https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-lines/ https://gopractice.io/blog/slack-ipo-reading-between-lines/ [2] https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-retention/ https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/net-dollar-retention/

larryyangsen 7y ago

We use gitlab.com with drone CICD.

OrgNet 7y ago

triple it... and gimme 20k, only.

mariogintili 7y ago

awww it seemed like yesterday when they accidentally dropped their prod db

sam1r 7y ago

Confirming I have used GitLab across 10 different domains/entities/projects & have had zero issues. IMO... both GH + GL are here to stay. Here's how I evaluate how to use for each one. => GitHub = OSS street cred. [You might want to get hired or want to showcase your skills] => GitLab = Business/Enterprise related. [You might want to earn $/make a living... you know.. following your countries' compliancy] FWIW...My two cents...Both great products, however, different use cases.

nscalf 7y ago
Totally agree with this, I think a lot of it stems from Github getting open source code in early and Gitlab having free private repos. I use Gitlab because of that. All of the open source work I did is done through Github. Ultimately, I'm glad they both exist, my go to is Gitlab though. And I'll be looking closely at their IPO to be an investor.