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How does GitLab compare in terms of it's CI/CD reliability?

by raybb 5y ago

colinmhayes 5y ago
My company recently switched to github actions from Gitlab CI because gitlab had so much downtime.
- pzduniak 5y ago
  Were you using self-hosted runners or the SaaS per-minute ones? My experience with Gitlab.com is probably irrelevant at this point, but years ago I didn't have any issues whatsoever with the combination of a Gitlab.com org with self-hosted runners... on AWS, I think?
globular-toast 5y ago
Our on-prem instance hasn't had any downtime I'm aware of in the past year at least.
- chockchocschoir 5y ago
  Same uptime as my development environment of GitHub then! (And similarly, my statement is as relevant as yours when it comes to the services CI uptime)
phphphphp 5y ago
I’m a big fan of GitHub Actions so take this with that in mind. GitLab (self-hosted) is very reliable however GitLab CI/CD is very different in design to GitHub Actions: it’s much more a bunch of shell scripts stuck together with YAML. Personally, I’d never go back (unless they redesign it).
- danogentili 5y ago
  Personally, I hate Github Actions from the bottom of my heart. Ever since Travis CI sold its soul and I've been forced to use Github Actions, and I've come to hate every single moment I have to work with some broken or buggy action, with the inability to restart only failed jobs (they added this vital feature only a few weeks ago, 2+ years after launching actions), with slow job spin-up times, which are only slightly reduced when using the self-hosted, RAM-hogging action runners which are only capable of running one job per instance, forcing me to waste RAM setting up multiple instances of the runners, each bundling its own copy of node and the .NET runtime. I've been using gitlab CI @ work, and I absolutely love its reliability and ease of use and configuration.
  - deathanatos 5y ago
    … yeah, we just moved some stuff to Actions, and it's been rather disappointing as onboarding goes. While the YAML represents jobs as a DAG, it seems like Actions can't actually evaluate them as such, and it inserts dependencies where none exist, i.e., it inserts stalls in the pipeline. Action builds aren't cached, so they're slow. The default token can't be extended to allow cross-repository access, forcing you to write your own app that can. The jobs, not the workflow, is the CI status/result, so you can't branch protect on a workflow. (You have to just have a dummy job … but you can't have an empty job, no, it has to run `true`…)
  - rezonant 5y ago
    I've been very happy with CircleCI
    - stnmtn 5y ago
      CircleCI has had multiple outages for us this past week, causing a lot of frustration.
      - rezonant 5y ago
        Interesting. None of our builds have failed due to CircleCI during that time period, or ever, that I can remember. We do maybe 5-10 builds a day during PST working hours. Not a huge volume but still would think it would have hit our radar. CircleCI's status page, which they are usually pretty good at updating, indicates two outages over the last two months, though one of them was a long one (9 hours?) but apparently only affected remote docker and machine runners. Neither of those were in the last week though.
fernandotakai 5y ago
i honestly prefer gitlab to github wrt CI/CD -- but i'm biased, i have ~4y of gitlab ci/cd usage, while i've only been using github for 6mo. gitlab feels easier to use, easier to write and i prefer the interface.
jasonm89 5y ago
GitLab seems to have been having their own set of issues this month. https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c08349f7 https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...
Beltiras 5y ago
I was a heavy GitLab CI/CD user till a couple of weeks ago when I switched jobs. Loved it for the 3 1/2 years I was a user. Sometimes a bit tricky to set up and understand (especially after we switched the executors to docker-in-docker, was a pain to figure out), but once it's running it goes off without a hitch and runs very reliably. My new position entails Github, I can give a comparison in a couple of months when I'm acclimated. EDIT: I see there are people down-thread that are discussing the SAAS version, ours was a on-site deployment so we could pretty much just spin up more iron if the executors were straining.
skwirl 5y ago
GitLab has its share of downtime. I don't use GitHub regularly so I can't really compare the two, but you will occasionally have a few hours where GitLab is down. Maybe 2 or 3 times per year?

How does GitLab compare in terms of it's CI/CD reliability?

by raybb 5y ago

How does GitLab compare in terms of it's CI/CD reliability?

colinmhayes 5y ago

My company recently switched to github actions from Gitlab CI because gitlab had so much downtime.

pzduniak 5y ago
Were you using self-hosted runners or the SaaS per-minute ones? My experience with Gitlab.com is probably irrelevant at this point, but years ago I didn't have any issues whatsoever with the combination of a Gitlab.com org with self-hosted runners... on AWS, I think?

globular-toast 5y ago

Our on-prem instance hasn't had any downtime I'm aware of in the past year at least.

chockchocschoir 5y ago
Same uptime as my development environment of GitHub then! (And similarly, my statement is as relevant as yours when it comes to the services CI uptime)

phphphphp 5y ago

I’m a big fan of GitHub Actions so take this with that in mind. GitLab (self-hosted) is very reliable however GitLab CI/CD is very different in design to GitHub Actions: it’s much more a bunch of shell scripts stuck together with YAML. Personally, I’d never go back (unless they redesign it).

danogentili 5y ago
Personally, I hate Github Actions from the bottom of my heart. Ever since Travis CI sold its soul and I've been forced to use Github Actions, and I've come to hate every single moment I have to work with some broken or buggy action, with the inability to restart only failed jobs (they added this vital feature only a few weeks ago, 2+ years after launching actions), with slow job spin-up times, which are only slightly reduced when using the self-hosted, RAM-hogging action runners which are only capable of running one job per instance, forcing me to waste RAM setting up multiple instances of the runners, each bundling its own copy of node and the .NET runtime. I've been using gitlab CI @ work, and I absolutely love its reliability and ease of use and configuration.
- deathanatos 5y ago
  … yeah, we just moved some stuff to Actions, and it's been rather disappointing as onboarding goes. While the YAML represents jobs as a DAG, it seems like Actions can't actually evaluate them as such, and it inserts dependencies where none exist, i.e., it inserts stalls in the pipeline. Action builds aren't cached, so they're slow. The default token can't be extended to allow cross-repository access, forcing you to write your own app that can. The jobs, not the workflow, is the CI status/result, so you can't branch protect on a workflow. (You have to just have a dummy job … but you can't have an empty job, no, it has to run `true`…)
- rezonant 5y ago
  I've been very happy with CircleCI
  - stnmtn 5y ago
    CircleCI has had multiple outages for us this past week, causing a lot of frustration.
    - rezonant 5y ago
      Interesting. None of our builds have failed due to CircleCI during that time period, or ever, that I can remember. We do maybe 5-10 builds a day during PST working hours. Not a huge volume but still would think it would have hit our radar. CircleCI's status page, which they are usually pretty good at updating, indicates two outages over the last two months, though one of them was a long one (9 hours?) but apparently only affected remote docker and machine runners. Neither of those were in the last week though.

fernandotakai 5y ago

i honestly prefer gitlab to github wrt CI/CD -- but i'm biased, i have ~4y of gitlab ci/cd usage, while i've only been using github for 6mo. gitlab feels easier to use, easier to write and i prefer the interface.

jasonm89 5y ago

GitLab seems to have been having their own set of issues this month. https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c08349f7 https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...

Beltiras 5y ago

I was a heavy GitLab CI/CD user till a couple of weeks ago when I switched jobs. Loved it for the 3 1/2 years I was a user. Sometimes a bit tricky to set up and understand (especially after we switched the executors to docker-in-docker, was a pain to figure out), but once it's running it goes off without a hitch and runs very reliably. My new position entails Github, I can give a comparison in a couple of months when I'm acclimated. EDIT: I see there are people down-thread that are discussing the SAAS version, ours was a on-site deployment so we could pretty much just spin up more iron if the executors were straining.

skwirl 5y ago

GitLab has its share of downtime. I don't use GitHub regularly so I can't really compare the two, but you will occasionally have a few hours where GitLab is down. Maybe 2 or 3 times per year?