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Arm Open Source makes a seamless migration to GitLab

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stavros 4y ago
This is a semi-offtopic complaint, but I really hate the user changes they made. I planned to add Gitlab as a secondary option in our company's stack until we saw enough value/moved enough stuff to it to justify the 12x price over Github, but with the change we're only allowed 5 free users. There's no way we'll pay $4000/mo for something people barely use, but we'd have paid for something everyone uses. I think they really shot themselves in the foot with that change.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  Would you mind sharing how you could have changed the price if you could have? There are also options like GitlabHost[0] that might have worked [0]: https://gitlabhost.com/pricing https://gitlabhost.com/pricing
  - stavros 4y ago
    It wasn't so much about the price itself, as we'd pay it if necessary (though having to pay $20/mo for someone to just have access to, say, GitLab pages isn't great). The problem was mostly the removal of free users. I had added most of the company to a GitLab org I created, and we were using more and more things there, we even have a private CI runner. It was a good way to gradually migrate the organization to GitLab. Now I have to move everything back because there's no way we'll pay thousands of dollars per month for it for the few things we use, and everyone but 5 people will lose access to it in a month. Basically, the "only 5 free users" thing removes the trojan horse of gradually moving to GitLab until we realize it's worth paying for.
    - prepend 4y ago
      I had the same problem. Probably only 10% of our users were actually devs and they contributed 99.9% of all changes. The other 90% were people reading pages, entering issues, commenting on stuff. I couldn’t justify paying the same per seat for an every day developer vs someone who might log in once a year (or never). They should have concurrent users or something for the PM/analyst/browser. Paying for named seats is too much.
      - hardwaresofton 4y ago
        Seems like there’s a large opportunity here if the pricing could be just a little more nuanced. Charging by code committers maybe make more sense…
        prepend 4y ago
        I talked to them a few years ago but they weren’t able to change their license. I guess there are orgs that pay $1000/user just for PMs to approve merges and stuff. We went with GitHub over it and it’s kind of a shame because GitLab has so many great features. I can’t bring myself to pay for 1000 seats so 50 developers can use GitLab. Not to mention for pages viewers where there’s probably 2-5k who view project docs and stuff. Paying for users to log in and view web sites is pretty crazy.
        hardwaresofton 4y ago
        Yeah it's an interesting problem, because those PMs are contributors in some sense, but just on a much lower scale, and single pricing doesn't really reflect that. As far as running the service goes, they do represent non-zero cost (they're going to be looking through stuff, triggering async jobs maybe, maintaining Gitlab pages setups, etc. They also represent possibly increased security burden (though I don't think anyone is pricing risk like that in the SaaS world just yet). If you don't mind me asking, what price would you happily pay for non technical contributors? Would you want a percentage of the developer/"full contributor" rate? Or do you have a specific number that would be reasonable in your opinion?
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Wow, gitlabhost seems also priced quite high if it's just the CE version and not EE. I was thinking some 2-4x multiplier vs just hosting it yourself - not 8x the price.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      This seems anectdotal to me. I don't think gitlab could survive at even 2x the price of "equal" setups between companies given they're both perfectly usable with some training. At least not in the long run. I use gitlab for my personal stuff but have no issues with github at work either. Edit: Dang! I just checked it is roughly 3-4x as much as listed (just going on CI minutes). So I take my "logic" back. I don't see how they can survive at those per user rates vs the competition. The software itself is certainly not 3-4X as good.
  - sugaroverflow 4y ago
    GitLab team member here :) There were recent changes to user limits on the Free tier of GitLab SaaS. We are limiting the number of users per namespace on the Free tier to 5 users per namespace. Details are in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier.
Beltiras 4y ago
I'm a huge advocate for GitLab. I used their on-premise offering at my last position (sadly have to work with GitHub now). I became quite intimate with how the CI/CD processes work on GitLab and heartily recommend it over GitHub or Atlassian offerings. I don't have experience with their cloud offering.
candiddevmike 4y ago
As a GitHub user, I don't think I see the value in Gitlab relative to what they charge. I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub and instead it's a bunch of loosely integrated, opinionated technologies/processes. Seems like by adopting Gitlab, you're adopting their view of how stuff should work. YMMV.
- hericium 4y ago
  > I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub I'm looking at this move/marketing of theirs as a show of being in opposition to Bitbucket which (along with other Atlassian's products) is made for managers.
- pid-1 4y ago
  I find their CI/CD much less opinionated than GitHub's.
- deepstack 4y ago
  main reason I use Gitlab instead of GitHub, MS. Won't touch a closed source MS project with 10 foot pole. Not after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel, etc.
  - deepstack 4y ago
    otherwise, there are gittee etc that way more lightweight where you can self-host.
    - wyldfire 4y ago
      I don't know if it makes sense to compare a service with a software that could be self-hosted. But if it did, you may want to mention that gitlab can also be self-hosted.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel Do you have a source for this bold claim? HN should be for facts, not Reddit FUD.
fourthark 4y ago
What does this mean? Arm was using GitHub for source code hosting. But most of the new core infrastructure that Arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware, and "GitHub is a black box and so we would have to work with them or let them do the work, and it wouldn't necessarily be correct," Wafaa says. "Then we'd have to do reviews. We wouldn't necessarily be able to do the patch reviews because it's all private and proprietary code… that was a big factor for us choosing GitLab." Seems garbled, what does the proprietary nature of GitHub have to do with code review process? Are they just saying they can’t host a lot of the code publicly?
- martinald 4y ago
  I think they are referring to on premesis GitHub Enterprise Server, which won't work for them because they are using new CPU archs like arm64 which it doesn't run on? That's my guess but not very clear at all...
- 3boll 4y ago
  IMHO they are talking about reviewing 3rd party software, not their own developments. But is not a great reason they probably have more products where the source is not available to them...
- lucideer 4y ago
  I would guess they're likely referring to the proprietary / black-box nature of (one of or a combination of) the Github API for automation tasks, the Github Apps marketplace & associated APIs, and the Github actions infra & archs.
- als0 4y ago
  Yeah I’m sure this is garbled by a VP. Sounds like they want more control over the CI process and keep more of that process private.
- masklinn 4y ago
  I’d think it’s issues like CI runners and the like? I don’t think you can handroll github dedicated runners (e.g. I read recently that there’s still no support for M1 dedicated runners). If ARM wants to run CI directly on the ISAs they’re developing, or with complicated custom toolchains such that they can run tests on ISA under development from a host machine, they probably need pretty extensive customisations on the runner site, which would require contracting github to do that for them, or having to work directly on github code, for ARM-exclusive needs. Either way a lot of collaboration work for something which isn’t really collaborative, or of any concern or value to github as a company. And with possible risks of information leak one way or another.
blippage 4y ago
I'm in the process of migrating my projects to GitLab myself, away from GitHub. It was a good excuse to consolidate projects and delete some stuff that is unlikely to be of use to me. GitHub does seem a bit simpler to use in my mind. My needs are simple, though.
rvz 4y ago
Smart choice. Unlike centralising everything to GitHub. [0] Self-hosting is indeed the way to go; especially for companies like ARM. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
alaricus 4y ago
Ever since Microsoft bought GitHub, I have been telling people to switch to something else (codeberg, gitlab... there are lots of alternatives). I'm glad ARM thinks the same.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Why?
  - alaricus 4y ago
    I don't like relying on Microsft. Their track record is bad.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  Ever since Microsoft bought Minecraft, I have been telling people to switch to something else (roblox, fortnight... there are lots of alternatives). I'm glad a company that was willing to sell off it's IP to one of the most closed source companies on the planet fell through...
  - kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
    > most closed source companies Slightly less now. But still not great.
pyler 4y ago
But do they support gitlab? Pay them? Or are they just (ab)use open source projects to spend less money? (They had to pay $$$ to github).
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  They at least support gotlan in being a testimonial. And usually that implies some commercial agreement. And typically such organisations, like arm, want to have a contract, and be it only to make lawyers happy. (clearer liability etc )
prytania 4y ago
AWS has a huge investment in Graviton processors (arm). AWS lacks a full-featured git product. GitHub == Microsoft. Curious if there’s anything happening in the background which further motivated this.
- prepend 4y ago
  AWS does have a product called CodeCompmit or something. But it’s not very good and even aws people usually use GitHub or GitLab or even BitBucket.
jnsaff2 4y ago
I really wanted to like GitLab but after having used in a few BigCo's I just can't get round to it. It's really slow and unstable. It's also constantly trying to push different messages into my face that I don't care about nor can I switch off those messages (Autodevops for example). Some of the ui tooltips constantly block the links I want to click on, search it REALLY slow and almost useless. This is the paid gitlab.com SaaS. Also after reading one of their postmortems about an incident where someone deleted a production DB, it just did not inspire confidence. Also they have taken a ton of VC money, not sure how long the "not Microsoft" argument is going to stand. Current client is on GitHub and the experience is definitely much better. Not happy about their MS ties and tech-bro misogyny problems. Hopeful for sourcehut tho.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I also find GitLab's UI pretty chaotic, and a lot of space is wasted on "UI chrome".
- simplehuman 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't understand those autodevops tooltips either.
  - danudey 4y ago
    I've yet to see an explanation of "autodevops", or what it does or how it works, that actually makes the feature make sense to me.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      They are simply ci/cd templates for building specific types of projects. If you turn autodevops on, then it will apply the template based on files found in the repo. Like a less opinionated Heroku that can deploy to your own k8s cluster. I have never really had a project generic enough that autodevops would work. But I think I did at one point copy one of their templates as a basis for my own gitlab-ci.yaml file. I think it also handles automatically configuring some things that you can't configure in your ci files, like prometheus monitoring.
wdb 4y ago
I wished they would work on their search. On Github you can easily explore and find new projects based on keywords. But on Gitlab this doesn't really work for me, the search is slow, or doesn't really search public Gitlab repositories
Dave3of5 4y ago
[Insert conspiracy theory about Microsoft and GitHub and Arm chips.] Bonus: something about 5G networks.
why-el 4y ago
I made the same half-serious joke about Gitlab since it came out: they do not understand visual contrast, and a github user coming to gitlab is instantly both overwhelmed by how much info is in their face and how blended everything is in the issue tracker (everything is white-backgrounded, no way to discern important info). Fix this and you will get people over.
roywashere 4y ago
> Arm has about 200 external contributors running open source projects, "and GitLab made it appealing cost-wise," Wafaa says. "That was just the icing on the cake." Usually the number of contributors is higher but Arm had to scale it back as it migrated projects to GitLab, he adds What does this mean? ARM needed to scale back their number of contributors because it was migrating to GitLab? I'm not sure how that can be great marketing?
apple4ever 4y ago
This link no longer works. They pulled it down?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This is a semi-offtopic complaint, but I really hate the user changes they made. I planned to add Gitlab as a secondary option in our company's stack until we saw enough value/moved enough stuff to it to justify the 12x price over Github, but with the change we're only allowed 5 free users. There's no way we'll pay $4000/mo for something people barely use, but we'd have paid for something everyone uses. I think they really shot themselves in the foot with that change.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
Would you mind sharing how you could have changed the price if you could have? There are also options like GitlabHost[0] that might have worked [0]: https://gitlabhost.com/pricing https://gitlabhost.com/pricing
- stavros 4y ago
  It wasn't so much about the price itself, as we'd pay it if necessary (though having to pay $20/mo for someone to just have access to, say, GitLab pages isn't great). The problem was mostly the removal of free users. I had added most of the company to a GitLab org I created, and we were using more and more things there, we even have a private CI runner. It was a good way to gradually migrate the organization to GitLab. Now I have to move everything back because there's no way we'll pay thousands of dollars per month for it for the few things we use, and everyone but 5 people will lose access to it in a month. Basically, the "only 5 free users" thing removes the trojan horse of gradually moving to GitLab until we realize it's worth paying for.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I had the same problem. Probably only 10% of our users were actually devs and they contributed 99.9% of all changes. The other 90% were people reading pages, entering issues, commenting on stuff. I couldn’t justify paying the same per seat for an every day developer vs someone who might log in once a year (or never). They should have concurrent users or something for the PM/analyst/browser. Paying for named seats is too much.
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      Seems like there’s a large opportunity here if the pricing could be just a little more nuanced. Charging by code committers maybe make more sense…
      - prepend 4y ago
        I talked to them a few years ago but they weren’t able to change their license. I guess there are orgs that pay $1000/user just for PMs to approve merges and stuff. We went with GitHub over it and it’s kind of a shame because GitLab has so many great features. I can’t bring myself to pay for 1000 seats so 50 developers can use GitLab. Not to mention for pages viewers where there’s probably 2-5k who view project docs and stuff. Paying for users to log in and view web sites is pretty crazy.
        hardwaresofton 4y ago
        Yeah it's an interesting problem, because those PMs are contributors in some sense, but just on a much lower scale, and single pricing doesn't really reflect that. As far as running the service goes, they do represent non-zero cost (they're going to be looking through stuff, triggering async jobs maybe, maintaining Gitlab pages setups, etc. They also represent possibly increased security burden (though I don't think anyone is pricing risk like that in the SaaS world just yet). If you don't mind me asking, what price would you happily pay for non technical contributors? Would you want a percentage of the developer/"full contributor" rate? Or do you have a specific number that would be reasonable in your opinion?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  Wow, gitlabhost seems also priced quite high if it's just the CE version and not EE. I was thinking some 2-4x multiplier vs just hosting it yourself - not 8x the price.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    This seems anectdotal to me. I don't think gitlab could survive at even 2x the price of "equal" setups between companies given they're both perfectly usable with some training. At least not in the long run. I use gitlab for my personal stuff but have no issues with github at work either. Edit: Dang! I just checked it is roughly 3-4x as much as listed (just going on CI minutes). So I take my "logic" back. I don't see how they can survive at those per user rates vs the competition. The software itself is certainly not 3-4X as good.
- sugaroverflow 4y ago
  GitLab team member here :) There were recent changes to user limits on the Free tier of GitLab SaaS. We are limiting the number of users per namespace on the Free tier to 5 users per namespace. Details are in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier.

Beltiras 4y ago

I'm a huge advocate for GitLab. I used their on-premise offering at my last position (sadly have to work with GitHub now). I became quite intimate with how the CI/CD processes work on GitLab and heartily recommend it over GitHub or Atlassian offerings. I don't have experience with their cloud offering.

candiddevmike 4y ago

As a GitHub user, I don't think I see the value in Gitlab relative to what they charge. I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub and instead it's a bunch of loosely integrated, opinionated technologies/processes. Seems like by adopting Gitlab, you're adopting their view of how stuff should work. YMMV.

hericium 4y ago
> I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub I'm looking at this move/marketing of theirs as a show of being in opposition to Bitbucket which (along with other Atlassian's products) is made for managers.
pid-1 4y ago
I find their CI/CD much less opinionated than GitHub's.
deepstack 4y ago
main reason I use Gitlab instead of GitHub, MS. Won't touch a closed source MS project with 10 foot pole. Not after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel, etc.
- deepstack 4y ago
  otherwise, there are gittee etc that way more lightweight where you can self-host.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    I don't know if it makes sense to compare a service with a software that could be self-hosted. But if it did, you may want to mention that gitlab can also be self-hosted.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel Do you have a source for this bold claim? HN should be for facts, not Reddit FUD.

fourthark 4y ago

What does this mean? Arm was using GitHub for source code hosting. But most of the new core infrastructure that Arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware, and "GitHub is a black box and so we would have to work with them or let them do the work, and it wouldn't necessarily be correct," Wafaa says. "Then we'd have to do reviews. We wouldn't necessarily be able to do the patch reviews because it's all private and proprietary code… that was a big factor for us choosing GitLab." Seems garbled, what does the proprietary nature of GitHub have to do with code review process? Are they just saying they can’t host a lot of the code publicly?

martinald 4y ago
I think they are referring to on premesis GitHub Enterprise Server, which won't work for them because they are using new CPU archs like arm64 which it doesn't run on? That's my guess but not very clear at all...
3boll 4y ago
IMHO they are talking about reviewing 3rd party software, not their own developments. But is not a great reason they probably have more products where the source is not available to them...
lucideer 4y ago
I would guess they're likely referring to the proprietary / black-box nature of (one of or a combination of) the Github API for automation tasks, the Github Apps marketplace & associated APIs, and the Github actions infra & archs.
als0 4y ago
Yeah I’m sure this is garbled by a VP. Sounds like they want more control over the CI process and keep more of that process private.
masklinn 4y ago
I’d think it’s issues like CI runners and the like? I don’t think you can handroll github dedicated runners (e.g. I read recently that there’s still no support for M1 dedicated runners). If ARM wants to run CI directly on the ISAs they’re developing, or with complicated custom toolchains such that they can run tests on ISA under development from a host machine, they probably need pretty extensive customisations on the runner site, which would require contracting github to do that for them, or having to work directly on github code, for ARM-exclusive needs. Either way a lot of collaboration work for something which isn’t really collaborative, or of any concern or value to github as a company. And with possible risks of information leak one way or another.

blippage 4y ago

I'm in the process of migrating my projects to GitLab myself, away from GitHub. It was a good excuse to consolidate projects and delete some stuff that is unlikely to be of use to me. GitHub does seem a bit simpler to use in my mind. My needs are simple, though.

rvz 4y ago

Smart choice. Unlike centralising everything to GitHub. [0] Self-hosting is indeed the way to go; especially for companies like ARM. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

alaricus 4y ago

Ever since Microsoft bought GitHub, I have been telling people to switch to something else (codeberg, gitlab... there are lots of alternatives). I'm glad ARM thinks the same.

hardware2win 4y ago
Why?
- alaricus 4y ago
  I don't like relying on Microsft. Their track record is bad.
bastardoperator 4y ago
Ever since Microsoft bought Minecraft, I have been telling people to switch to something else (roblox, fortnight... there are lots of alternatives). I'm glad a company that was willing to sell off it's IP to one of the most closed source companies on the planet fell through...
- kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
  > most closed source companies Slightly less now. But still not great.

pyler 4y ago

But do they support gitlab? Pay them? Or are they just (ab)use open source projects to spend less money? (They had to pay $$$ to github).

johannes1234321 4y ago
They at least support gotlan in being a testimonial. And usually that implies some commercial agreement. And typically such organisations, like arm, want to have a contract, and be it only to make lawyers happy. (clearer liability etc )

prytania 4y ago

AWS has a huge investment in Graviton processors (arm). AWS lacks a full-featured git product. GitHub == Microsoft. Curious if there’s anything happening in the background which further motivated this.

prepend 4y ago
AWS does have a product called CodeCompmit or something. But it’s not very good and even aws people usually use GitHub or GitLab or even BitBucket.

jnsaff2 4y ago

I really wanted to like GitLab but after having used in a few BigCo's I just can't get round to it. It's really slow and unstable. It's also constantly trying to push different messages into my face that I don't care about nor can I switch off those messages (Autodevops for example). Some of the ui tooltips constantly block the links I want to click on, search it REALLY slow and almost useless. This is the paid gitlab.com SaaS. Also after reading one of their postmortems about an incident where someone deleted a production DB, it just did not inspire confidence. Also they have taken a ton of VC money, not sure how long the "not Microsoft" argument is going to stand. Current client is on GitHub and the experience is definitely much better. Not happy about their MS ties and tech-bro misogyny problems. Hopeful for sourcehut tho.

Beltalowda 4y ago
I also find GitLab's UI pretty chaotic, and a lot of space is wasted on "UI chrome".
simplehuman 4y ago
Yeah, I don't understand those autodevops tooltips either.
- danudey 4y ago
  I've yet to see an explanation of "autodevops", or what it does or how it works, that actually makes the feature make sense to me.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    They are simply ci/cd templates for building specific types of projects. If you turn autodevops on, then it will apply the template based on files found in the repo. Like a less opinionated Heroku that can deploy to your own k8s cluster. I have never really had a project generic enough that autodevops would work. But I think I did at one point copy one of their templates as a basis for my own gitlab-ci.yaml file. I think it also handles automatically configuring some things that you can't configure in your ci files, like prometheus monitoring.

wdb 4y ago

I wished they would work on their search. On Github you can easily explore and find new projects based on keywords. But on Gitlab this doesn't really work for me, the search is slow, or doesn't really search public Gitlab repositories

Dave3of5 4y ago

[Insert conspiracy theory about Microsoft and GitHub and Arm chips.] Bonus: something about 5G networks.

why-el 4y ago

I made the same half-serious joke about Gitlab since it came out: they do not understand visual contrast, and a github user coming to gitlab is instantly both overwhelmed by how much info is in their face and how blended everything is in the issue tracker (everything is white-backgrounded, no way to discern important info). Fix this and you will get people over.

roywashere 4y ago

> Arm has about 200 external contributors running open source projects, "and GitLab made it appealing cost-wise," Wafaa says. "That was just the icing on the cake." Usually the number of contributors is higher but Arm had to scale it back as it migrated projects to GitLab, he adds What does this mean? ARM needed to scale back their number of contributors because it was migrating to GitLab? I'm not sure how that can be great marketing?

apple4ever 4y ago

This link no longer works. They pulled it down?