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Does this mean I can ewrite a web app, put the source on GitLab and have GitLab run the web app (ideally with very minimal hassle)? If not, what does it mean?

Does this mean I can ewrite a web app, put the source on GitLab and have GitLab run the web app (ideally with very minimal hassle)? If not, what does it mean? What is Gitlab letting me do now than (a) it didn't do before (b) Github doesn't do?

nicoburns 4y ago
It means that a big part Gitlab's offering is now things like CI, whereas originally it was just code hosting.
- afandian 4y ago
  They haven't sold them selves as 'just code hosting' for some time. I almost wish they did. They've negleted basic stuff yet their marketing sells them as an all-in-one solution. A thousand dollars per seat per year (no fractions!) for the WHOLE organization just for nested Epics? No thanks. This 2 year old thread just keeps on giving: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 I'd join many participants in advising anyone to think very carefully before adopting GitLab.
  - harabat 4y ago
    Would you be able to list some of the negative developments you expect from GitLab going forward? For example, I know they are reducing support for Free Tier on their managed instance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30791162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30791162). Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? What would you recommend instead? Gitea?
    - afandian 4y ago
      I should say that I respect and admire GitLab's pursuit of financial sustainability and not selling themselves too cheap. But the resulting culture, combined with the actual product experience, is offputting. The issue tracking and labelling system is fine for what it is, but not good enough for planning projects. The Epics and Milestones functionality appears thrown together and isn't useful for much (we tried). Missing features such as persistent links to milestones (links are essentially a text string), lack of workflows ("You can do anything! Just ... use labels"), Milestones lack a change history, lack of nested Epics. We want to be able to use confidential issues every now and again, which mean that everyone in the org needs a seat license to contribute or even view. If you want nested Epics you have to jump from $240 /seat/year to $1200 /seat/year for every single seat (hence the above linked issue). Fundamentally they are trying to be the "everything" platform, and their sales material suggets that you can drop subscriptions to all kinds of competitors. Our experience was that the features weren't quite good enough. I don't necessarily expect things to get worse. I just find that the tools aren't quite good enough to justify the sales talk, and seeing them expand the breadth of feature set without improving core stuff is disappointing. We're staying with GitLab for code and dev team, because we're already there and we've built CI pipelines etc. But moving to Jira for issue tracking and planning, and so far it's much nicer. EDIT: Just noticed that they closed the issue [0] with a glib "opportunities to help customers derive more value from GitLab". [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        > But moving to Jira for issue tracking and planning, and so far it's much nicer. Wow, Jira being better is really damning. FWIW, there's a lot of competitors to Jira these days, and most of them are much better. We're using Shortcut, and it's been excellent.
        afandian 4y ago
        Yeah we went into it with eyes open. I know "everyone hates Jira". We did evaluate Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) and I did talk to a sales engineer. We weren't able to make our issues open to the public, which was a serious blocker. It wasn't clear how we would differentiate between user stories, bug tracking, epics, planned work, etc. And how to handle and track support and operational issues. The response in the org (we're not all devs) has been almost universally positive, and very favourable compared to our GitLab issue-tracking experience.
- abofh 4y ago
  Which is unfortunate, because outside of gitlab.com, I've found gitlabs CI offering to be more unpleasant than any of the competition in terms of "DevOps" implementation, scalability and automation.
  - freddiecoleman 4y ago
    I'm amazed that more people aren't vocal about this. When I was using Gitlab (last year) the pipelines seemed unnecessarily complicated with knowledge of the underlying implementation details sometimes being required to get anything done. Almost every week we would hit some edge case to be presented with a several year old thread on Gitlab where loads of other people have the same problem and it hasn't been addressed yet.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
A year or two ago the industry decided everything had to be 'a platform'. This is them saying "we too will chase industry trends for cash. we have a platform!!! bring us your money". The branding/logo thing... I guess is to reinforce to potential customers that they do more than host code, I dunno. Nobody understands what DevOps means so I'm not sure why they'd lean into that.
john_cogs 4y ago
GitLab team member here. You may want to check out (and sign up as a beta tester) for Cloud Seed, an open-source program led by GitLab Incubation Engineering in collaboration with Google Cloud: https://hello.cloudseed.app/ https://hello.cloudseed.app/
- cabalamat 4y ago
  According to that URL: > Deploying web applications from GitLab to major cloud providers should be trivial. Yes, that's what I want! I find it easy to develop web apps in Python, but a PITA to deploy them.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    You can get gitlab cicd to build a docker image based on your python code that you can push to whatever cloud thing you like
_joel 4y ago
Not exactly gitlab but a cloud provider via https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/index.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/index.html - bonus is you get feature branch hosting if you want too. I've used it and it worked well, even wrote an Elixir/Pheonix custom buildpack (but most common frameworks supported)
dnsmichi 4y ago
GitLab team member here. > Does this mean I can ewrite a web app, put the source on GitLab and have GitLab run the web app (ideally with very minimal hassle)? Cloud Seed aims to make this easier, deploying the web application with minimal effort to your preferred cloud. More details in https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/cloud_seed/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/cloud_seed/ and https://hello.cloudseed.app/ https://hello.cloudseed.app/ - it is a joint project from Google Cloud and GitLab. In case you run your web app in a containerized stack, and prefer to deploy to Kubernetes, the integration with the Agent for Kubernetes has been greatly improved: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/agent/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/agent/ If you are looking to host static web apps (e.g. Hugo, etc.), GitLab Pages can help. More ideas in this blog post to choose a static site generator (SSG): https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/04/18/comparing-static-site-generators/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/04/18/comparing-static-si... > If not, what does it mean? What is Gitlab letting me do now than (a) it didn't do before (b) Github doesn't do? Depending on which version you are at, new releases add features every month on the 22nd. GitLab 14.10 https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/04/22/gitlab-14-10-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/04/22/gitlab-14-10-re... added the GitLab Runner Operator for Kubernetes for example. That's an integration after the create (SCM) and verify (CI) stage, ensuring that cloud native deployments deploy applications, and maintenance levels follow best practices. There are more stages in the DevOps lifecycle, such as package and release or protect and secure. Observability for deployed applications, and ensuring that performance regressions do not reach production is also a very hot topic imho (shameless plug: join my talk at KubeCon EU to chat more https://kccnceu2022.sched.com/event/yttd?iframe=no https://kccnceu2022.sched.com/event/yttd?iframe=no :)) With regards what you can do now - I've written a blog post about my favourite hacks in GitLab a while ago, maybe there are some features or workflows that are useful for your environment: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/19/top-10-gitlab-hacks/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/19/top-10-gitlab-hacks... That said, GitLab 15.0 is around the corner, coming May 22. https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-releases/ https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-releases/ I'm personally most excited about the Podman support for GitLab runner, helping with containerized CI/CD infrastructure as alternative to Docker as executor. The GitLab direction handbook provides more insights for future plans: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ Recommend diving into the stages and review based on your requirements, or potential new ideas and use cases. If you miss anything, please open feature proposals to collaborate: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues Thanks :)

nicoburns 4y ago

It means that a big part Gitlab's offering is now things like CI, whereas originally it was just code hosting.

afandian 4y ago
They haven't sold them selves as 'just code hosting' for some time. I almost wish they did. They've negleted basic stuff yet their marketing sells them as an all-in-one solution. A thousand dollars per seat per year (no fractions!) for the WHOLE organization just for nested Epics? No thanks. This 2 year old thread just keeps on giving: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 I'd join many participants in advising anyone to think very carefully before adopting GitLab.
- harabat 4y ago
  Would you be able to list some of the negative developments you expect from GitLab going forward? For example, I know they are reducing support for Free Tier on their managed instance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30791162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30791162). Is that the kind of thing you're talking about? What would you recommend instead? Gitea?
  - afandian 4y ago
    I should say that I respect and admire GitLab's pursuit of financial sustainability and not selling themselves too cheap. But the resulting culture, combined with the actual product experience, is offputting. The issue tracking and labelling system is fine for what it is, but not good enough for planning projects. The Epics and Milestones functionality appears thrown together and isn't useful for much (we tried). Missing features such as persistent links to milestones (links are essentially a text string), lack of workflows ("You can do anything! Just ... use labels"), Milestones lack a change history, lack of nested Epics. We want to be able to use confidential issues every now and again, which mean that everyone in the org needs a seat license to contribute or even view. If you want nested Epics you have to jump from $240 /seat/year to $1200 /seat/year for every single seat (hence the above linked issue). Fundamentally they are trying to be the "everything" platform, and their sales material suggets that you can drop subscriptions to all kinds of competitors. Our experience was that the features weren't quite good enough. I don't necessarily expect things to get worse. I just find that the tools aren't quite good enough to justify the sales talk, and seeing them expand the breadth of feature set without improving core stuff is disappointing. We're staying with GitLab for code and dev team, because we're already there and we've built CI pipelines etc. But moving to Jira for issue tracking and planning, and so far it's much nicer. EDIT: Just noticed that they closed the issue [0] with a glib "opportunities to help customers derive more value from GitLab". [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      > But moving to Jira for issue tracking and planning, and so far it's much nicer. Wow, Jira being better is really damning. FWIW, there's a lot of competitors to Jira these days, and most of them are much better. We're using Shortcut, and it's been excellent.
      - afandian 4y ago
        Yeah we went into it with eyes open. I know "everyone hates Jira". We did evaluate Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) and I did talk to a sales engineer. We weren't able to make our issues open to the public, which was a serious blocker. It wasn't clear how we would differentiate between user stories, bug tracking, epics, planned work, etc. And how to handle and track support and operational issues. The response in the org (we're not all devs) has been almost universally positive, and very favourable compared to our GitLab issue-tracking experience.
abofh 4y ago
Which is unfortunate, because outside of gitlab.com, I've found gitlabs CI offering to be more unpleasant than any of the competition in terms of "DevOps" implementation, scalability and automation.
- freddiecoleman 4y ago
  I'm amazed that more people aren't vocal about this. When I was using Gitlab (last year) the pipelines seemed unnecessarily complicated with knowledge of the underlying implementation details sometimes being required to get anything done. Almost every week we would hit some edge case to be presented with a several year old thread on Gitlab where loads of other people have the same problem and it hasn't been addressed yet.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

A year or two ago the industry decided everything had to be 'a platform'. This is them saying "we too will chase industry trends for cash. we have a platform!!! bring us your money". The branding/logo thing... I guess is to reinforce to potential customers that they do more than host code, I dunno. Nobody understands what DevOps means so I'm not sure why they'd lean into that.

john_cogs 4y ago

GitLab team member here. You may want to check out (and sign up as a beta tester) for Cloud Seed, an open-source program led by GitLab Incubation Engineering in collaboration with Google Cloud: https://hello.cloudseed.app/ https://hello.cloudseed.app/

cabalamat 4y ago
According to that URL: > Deploying web applications from GitLab to major cloud providers should be trivial. Yes, that's what I want! I find it easy to develop web apps in Python, but a PITA to deploy them.
- Havoc 4y ago
  You can get gitlab cicd to build a docker image based on your python code that you can push to whatever cloud thing you like

_joel 4y ago

Not exactly gitlab but a cloud provider via https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/index.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/index.html - bonus is you get feature branch hosting if you want too. I've used it and it worked well, even wrote an Elixir/Pheonix custom buildpack (but most common frameworks supported)

dnsmichi 4y ago

GitLab team member here. > Does this mean I can ewrite a web app, put the source on GitLab and have GitLab run the web app (ideally with very minimal hassle)? Cloud Seed aims to make this easier, deploying the web application with minimal effort to your preferred cloud. More details in https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/cloud_seed/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/cloud_seed/ and https://hello.cloudseed.app/ https://hello.cloudseed.app/ - it is a joint project from Google Cloud and GitLab. In case you run your web app in a containerized stack, and prefer to deploy to Kubernetes, the integration with the Agent for Kubernetes has been greatly improved: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/agent/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/clusters/agent/ If you are looking to host static web apps (e.g. Hugo, etc.), GitLab Pages can help. More ideas in this blog post to choose a static site generator (SSG): https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/04/18/comparing-static-site-generators/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/04/18/comparing-static-si... > If not, what does it mean? What is Gitlab letting me do now than (a) it didn't do before (b) Github doesn't do? Depending on which version you are at, new releases add features every month on the 22nd. GitLab 14.10 https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/04/22/gitlab-14-10-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/04/22/gitlab-14-10-re... added the GitLab Runner Operator for Kubernetes for example. That's an integration after the create (SCM) and verify (CI) stage, ensuring that cloud native deployments deploy applications, and maintenance levels follow best practices. There are more stages in the DevOps lifecycle, such as package and release or protect and secure. Observability for deployed applications, and ensuring that performance regressions do not reach production is also a very hot topic imho (shameless plug: join my talk at KubeCon EU to chat more https://kccnceu2022.sched.com/event/yttd?iframe=no https://kccnceu2022.sched.com/event/yttd?iframe=no :)) With regards what you can do now - I've written a blog post about my favourite hacks in GitLab a while ago, maybe there are some features or workflows that are useful for your environment: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/19/top-10-gitlab-hacks/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/19/top-10-gitlab-hacks... That said, GitLab 15.0 is around the corner, coming May 22. https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-releases/ https://about.gitlab.com/upcoming-releases/ I'm personally most excited about the Podman support for GitLab runner, helping with containerized CI/CD infrastructure as alternative to Docker as executor. The GitLab direction handbook provides more insights for future plans: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ Recommend diving into the stages and review based on your requirements, or potential new ideas and use cases. If you miss anything, please open feature proposals to collaborate: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues Thanks :)