3 ms·

I'm not a pro dev by any means but what is stopping orgs from simply self hosting such a thing? Git is merely version control which supposedly does not take a l

by fibers 6y ago

I'm not a pro dev by any means but what is stopping orgs from simply self hosting such a thing? Git is merely version control which supposedly does not take a lot of resources so you can go ahead and buy a dedicated server and host it in your office. Is the question more so about expanded services like CI/CD that may take up more computational resources to continuously build binaries and other deliverables?

sjagoe 6y ago
I would say it's less about the compute resources, and more about possibly needing a team dedicated to maintaining quite a lot of infrastructure to replace the features that GitHub has, which is far more extensive than just git hosting.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  GitLab, Gitea or others provide most, if not all, and in some cases even more features than GitHub. Theiy are fully or partially Open Source and they are easy to host. You need to compare the cost of self-hosting to the cost of SaaS - INCLUDING the risk of getting locked out. One downside of the SaaS model is that you are just a very small customer in the bigger scheme and they can't really justify spending money on servicing you. Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account? You much power do you have in a negotiation if you are a net-negative account?
  - kavalg 6y ago
    WRT self hosting, GitLab could be painful, but Gitea is really easy to host and keep up to date.
    - risyachka 6y ago
      I've been self-hosting gitlab for few years now in my company and never had a problem.
      - sitkack 6y ago
        You should clone your environment and then inject faults into the clone to cause yourself some simulated problems.
      - kavalg 6y ago
        How much resources does that consume (both compute and human)? Have you done upgrades?
  - vinay427 6y ago
    > Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account? It probably isn't sustainable for a business to only consider this aspect. One thing that comes to mind with companies that thrive with a large number of small non-B2B customers, who individually don't tend to have much power, is that they understand that people love to talk about customer service when it's bad, and occasionally when it's very good as well. Word spreads, and nearly everyone places at least a little weight on this public perception of kindness or flexibility with customers especially when it isn't in the immediate financial interest of the company to do so.
- chillfox 6y ago
  Maintaining a self hosted solution like GilLab takes less than a day of work a year, and it has more features than GitHub. (I have been doing it for years)
- wolco2 6y ago
  If you have developers that can use git they can setup and maintain a local git or source control. If no one in your company can do that.. hire or outsource.
- denton-scratch 6y ago
  It's perfectly possible for a team of 10 devs to run on self-hosted source-code control, run an in-house CI system, and run application hosting, with just one tech (and one backup) working part-time on maintaining the system. You need a VM host for the CI; now you have a VM host, you can build git servers and so on (bring the email inhouse, perhaps?). As far as maintaining the system is concerned: setups that are hosted by 3rd-parties also need maintenance. Someone has to understand how it all fits together, and how to fix it when it goes wrong. So you still need a team-member working part-time on SCC, CI and deployment.
Xylakant 6y ago
The compute part is the least of your worries, even installing the software is usually not your primary concern - everything is fine as long as you're on the happy path. Software needs to maintained, patched, backed up, verified etc. It has bugs, security issues, hardware breaks in weird ways. This takes time and skill - ideally you'd need two or three people that are capable of fixing problems with the install. (one ill, one on vacation, one available). This is something that detracts from the actual work you're doing. I'm very much an ops person and I actually like tinkering with a gitlab install - it's just so many moving parts that I prefer not to run this for my company since it would eat a substantial chunk of my time just caring for this.
- mcguire 6y ago
  The bottom line is that it is cheaper to use GitHub and live with the external risks than to maintain internal services or live without them. I note that the Linux kernel lived with bare Git for many years.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    At least for small to medium organizations without specific reasons for self-hosting. Once you have a team that manages internal infrastructure, this calculus can change. The Linux kernel is a very specific case with a very specific development model that likely doesn’t apply to most other projects.
tetha 6y ago
Self-Hosting is a similar tradeoff to running your own hardware, imo. You can increase control and overall cost effectiveness for additional scaling, but these choices have a certain base cost you can't reduce. Thus, they only work beyond a certain initial scale, or because you have some specialized requirements. For example, the source code as well as the tickets around a software tend to be the most critical assets of a company. As such, you need one or better 2 systems to host the source host and ticketing. However, such a system needs backups, so suddenly you need to maintain a backup solution, you need to implement and monitor the backups being created, you need restore tests. You end up needing some kind of monitoring as well. As well as 2-3 dudes at least part-time maintaining all of this capable of replacing each other during sickness and vacation. That's a lot of stuff as well as a lot of manpower as your base cost. Of course, once you have that, you can self-host a lot of things easily and maintain excellent uptime at minimal risk, because these base services scale very well in complexity. For us it makes sense to do this, because unplanned outages at 100+ developers are seriously expensive and risky. However, if you have 3 developers and a clock ticking to find product market fit, you don't have that budget - or spending it this way does not make sense. So you buy.

by fibers 6y ago

sjagoe 6y ago

I would say it's less about the compute resources, and more about possibly needing a team dedicated to maintaining quite a lot of infrastructure to replace the features that GitHub has, which is far more extensive than just git hosting.

turbinerneiter 6y ago
GitLab, Gitea or others provide most, if not all, and in some cases even more features than GitHub. Theiy are fully or partially Open Source and they are easy to host. You need to compare the cost of self-hosting to the cost of SaaS - INCLUDING the risk of getting locked out. One downside of the SaaS model is that you are just a very small customer in the bigger scheme and they can't really justify spending money on servicing you. Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account? You much power do you have in a negotiation if you are a net-negative account?
- kavalg 6y ago
  WRT self hosting, GitLab could be painful, but Gitea is really easy to host and keep up to date.
  - risyachka 6y ago
    I've been self-hosting gitlab for few years now in my company and never had a problem.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      You should clone your environment and then inject faults into the clone to cause yourself some simulated problems.
    - kavalg 6y ago
      How much resources does that consume (both compute and human)? Have you done upgrades?
- vinay427 6y ago
  > Let's say you are company of 5 people, paying 50 bucks a month for a service - how many hours per year can they spend on servicing you before you become a net-negative account? It probably isn't sustainable for a business to only consider this aspect. One thing that comes to mind with companies that thrive with a large number of small non-B2B customers, who individually don't tend to have much power, is that they understand that people love to talk about customer service when it's bad, and occasionally when it's very good as well. Word spreads, and nearly everyone places at least a little weight on this public perception of kindness or flexibility with customers especially when it isn't in the immediate financial interest of the company to do so.
chillfox 6y ago
Maintaining a self hosted solution like GilLab takes less than a day of work a year, and it has more features than GitHub. (I have been doing it for years)
wolco2 6y ago
If you have developers that can use git they can setup and maintain a local git or source control. If no one in your company can do that.. hire or outsource.
denton-scratch 6y ago
It's perfectly possible for a team of 10 devs to run on self-hosted source-code control, run an in-house CI system, and run application hosting, with just one tech (and one backup) working part-time on maintaining the system. You need a VM host for the CI; now you have a VM host, you can build git servers and so on (bring the email inhouse, perhaps?). As far as maintaining the system is concerned: setups that are hosted by 3rd-parties also need maintenance. Someone has to understand how it all fits together, and how to fix it when it goes wrong. So you still need a team-member working part-time on SCC, CI and deployment.

Xylakant 6y ago

The compute part is the least of your worries, even installing the software is usually not your primary concern - everything is fine as long as you're on the happy path. Software needs to maintained, patched, backed up, verified etc. It has bugs, security issues, hardware breaks in weird ways. This takes time and skill - ideally you'd need two or three people that are capable of fixing problems with the install. (one ill, one on vacation, one available). This is something that detracts from the actual work you're doing. I'm very much an ops person and I actually like tinkering with a gitlab install - it's just so many moving parts that I prefer not to run this for my company since it would eat a substantial chunk of my time just caring for this.

mcguire 6y ago
The bottom line is that it is cheaper to use GitHub and live with the external risks than to maintain internal services or live without them. I note that the Linux kernel lived with bare Git for many years.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  At least for small to medium organizations without specific reasons for self-hosting. Once you have a team that manages internal infrastructure, this calculus can change. The Linux kernel is a very specific case with a very specific development model that likely doesn’t apply to most other projects.

tetha 6y ago

Self-Hosting is a similar tradeoff to running your own hardware, imo. You can increase control and overall cost effectiveness for additional scaling, but these choices have a certain base cost you can't reduce. Thus, they only work beyond a certain initial scale, or because you have some specialized requirements. For example, the source code as well as the tickets around a software tend to be the most critical assets of a company. As such, you need one or better 2 systems to host the source host and ticketing. However, such a system needs backups, so suddenly you need to maintain a backup solution, you need to implement and monitor the backups being created, you need restore tests. You end up needing some kind of monitoring as well. As well as 2-3 dudes at least part-time maintaining all of this capable of replacing each other during sickness and vacation. That's a lot of stuff as well as a lot of manpower as your base cost. Of course, once you have that, you can self-host a lot of things easily and maintain excellent uptime at minimal risk, because these base services scale very well in complexity. For us it makes sense to do this, because unplanned outages at 100+ developers are seriously expensive and risky. However, if you have 3 developers and a clock ticking to find product market fit, you don't have that budget - or spending it this way does not make sense. So you buy.