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I’m a Gitlab fanboy, but you’re right. We run a medium sized Gitlab instance and wanted to automate a bunch of tasks on it - like you should as a good adherent

by orf 6y ago

I’m a Gitlab fanboy, but you’re right. We run a medium sized Gitlab instance and wanted to automate a bunch of tasks on it - like you should as a good adherent to DevOps principals. But Gitlab is actively hostile to you building automations on top of it. Every access token is tied to a Gitlab User and every user is charged X$ a month, regardless of if it’s a bot or not. So the end result of this is a single bot user with poorly scoped permissions that can only be configured by an administrator. Great. They are slowly moving forward with this epic[1] but the discussions around pricing are ridiculous. Don’t you _want_ people to build automations around Gitlab, as it makes it more entrenched in your org. Stop making it harder by effectively charging hundreds of dollars a year per bot user. Would love any comments you have on that @syste. 1. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3559 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3559

rifelpet 6y ago
They're addressing the lack of service accounts, targeted for 13.1: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6883 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6883
- sytse 6y ago
  Yep, we want to charge only for people, not bots. Sorry it took a while to resolve this, it was complex.
  - orf 6y ago
    I’m really glad you’ve reached this decision, but I’m still not happy with being asked “why are these automation tasks costing us $XXX” per year during our last recent license license update. Until this epic is completed you are charging people full-seat price for automation users which, because of the poorly-scoped token permissions, require multiple “user” accounts to implement securely. An automation utility in no way delivers the same value as a full time developer and it really shook me to know that this is how you have historically valued bots. It runs counter to everything that you publicise.

by orf 6y ago

rifelpet 6y ago

They're addressing the lack of service accounts, targeted for 13.1: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6883 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6883

sytse 6y ago
Yep, we want to charge only for people, not bots. Sorry it took a while to resolve this, it was complex.
- orf 6y ago
  I’m really glad you’ve reached this decision, but I’m still not happy with being asked “why are these automation tasks costing us $XXX” per year during our last recent license license update. Until this epic is completed you are charging people full-seat price for automation users which, because of the poorly-scoped token permissions, require multiple “user” accounts to implement securely. An automation utility in no way delivers the same value as a full time developer and it really shook me to know that this is how you have historically valued bots. It runs counter to everything that you publicise.