10 ms·

Gitlab Dedicated – our new single-tenant SaaS offering

222 points by mikece 4y ago

nimbius 4y ago
so no pricing and its offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product versus, say, a $24 a month vultr instance or something... if you had 60 devs using the service thats 14k a year. you could have one of them thats on payroll maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD and im not sure it would really matter. Is there something im missing?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Even in those cases you'll usually see the enterprise option is 'call us'. I wouldn't make extreme assumptions based on the pricing model.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Yeah. That is the biggest cultural difference between "suit tech" and "t-shirt tech" - the old boomer-generation suits love personal connections and dealings of any kind, while the modern generation prefers efficiency and getting their work done without pseudo-social bullshit.
    - HatchedLake721 4y ago
      Nothing to do with t-shirts and suits. Enterprise deals can go anywhere between $50k and $10m+ per year. No one parts with that amount of money to “self serve” themselves by entering a credit card.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        Credit cards vs invoicing seems orthogonal - this is about seeing a price up front.
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  Yeah, that's actually how much I pay for my instance on Vultr. Granted it's only a few users... It is a bit tricky at times to keep things up to date and secure enough, it would've been great to see a price tag for small teams or something. I mean, I do get that at that point (<= 5 devs) these guys (nor any other company of that size) actually cares about that particular case study since one could just stick to their free tier on the main site.
  - lbotos 4y ago
    If you have any insights as to what makes it tricky to keep up to date I'm all ears. Would love to know: Single node? Omnibus or docker based? Making upgrades easier for all users is a core part of my plan for the next year (I work at GL)
    - pelagicAustral 4y ago
      I guess my comment was a bit misleading, what I meant was the entire sysop of having a single node (which is what I have) running smoothly. I mainly work development so at times having to tinker with the OS, keeping things up to date (including GL), secure, manage logs, etc can be quite time consuming. I do remember the first time I have a bit of a meltdown with the stage upgrade procedure. Granted the same thing can be said of any upgrade, you follow steps toward latest and greatest. But it was a bit of a job to get that up to date from the image provided by Vultr.
- nixgeek 4y ago
  Exact pricing is not listed, however if you dig around on GitLab’s site [1] it says Dedicated is for purchasers of >= 2000 seats of Ultimate, plus a management fee to cover defraying the infrastructure cost, and the time to look after it for you. From this even with generous discounting on those seats, I’d infer this is for customers willing to spend >$50k/mo or >$500k/yr. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/#pricing https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/...
- Thaxll 4y ago
  Comparing a SaaS solution to a cheap vps like vultr is completely missing the point.
- senko 4y ago
  > Is there something im missing? Yes. This is for big corporations who absolutely must not use shared/co-hosted/non-dedicated hardware, but don't want to maintain the thing themselves. We had several such customers at my previous startup; one of them was a bank, another was a popular household name, neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise if they only shopped for the cheapest option.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Cheaper than blame when there is a vendor snafu, compliance/regulatory risk and all that. It’s mostly a risk insurance premium.
  - tallship 4y ago
    > neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise And therein lies the business model of throwing good money after bad, and that's not even taking into consideration the enormous cost benefits of self-hosting with one's own physically colocated hardware infra and a meager full time staff. Not batting an eye, or rather, "...so much as blinked", as you said, are bourne of business models with factored in wreckless budget kruft that may at first be acceptable until one merely scratches the surface of cost savings. Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... * Response time of support staff would be under 5 minutes. * Dedicated support staff would actually need to "dedicate" very little actual man-hours to support functions, freeing them up to have their budgeted labor resources allocated elsewhere in the company most of the time. This is a wonderfully stark and typical example of how to sell vendor lock-in for a FOSS solution... brilliant!
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... There's a bigger issue: security updates. With self-host, you have to subscribe to a ton of better-or-less-well-organized mailing lists, and once a 0-day is published you are in the race between your IT team and exploiters (who can and will find your instance on Shodan). In contrast, SaaS vendors (usually...) get informed about vulnerabilities prior to everyone else, so you don't have to worry about timely updates.
- bmitc 4y ago
  I have never understood why companies don't just publish pricing. It too often means pricing is just a game they want to play, for both personal and enterprise use, and it's a game I all too often don't want to play. If pricing is not available, I almost universally move on.
  - a_c 4y ago
    Enterprise software is more willing to milk money from corporate than to leave money on the table. The amount of money a company is will to pay can be order of magnitudes higher than an enterprise software imagined. Hence SaaS company hire bunch of sales people/sales engineer to "understand your need", which is an euphemistic way of asking how deep your pocket is. And when everyone is doing this, you can't simply move on, there are only so much options. Of course, you could see it completely differently, private pricing means longer sales process, higher labour cost and fewer customer. Having tiered offering is common. This is actually what gitlab did, free plan, individual plans, business plan[1]. If you don't need worrying about data residency, you don't need contacting their sales at all. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
    - a_c 4y ago
      One more angle, when you are starting up, every bucks feel like coming out of your own pocket. When purchasing "enterprise plan", your company already attain certain size and you are spending your company's money, money that otherwise would not fall under your pocket anyway.
      - zeeZ 4y ago
        Or your startup is forced to look into "enterprise plans" due to necessary features for compliance being locked behind them, without having attained a certain size and "enterprise" money.
  - cbzoiav 4y ago
    Because when you are dealing with corporates the amount of time needed can vary massively by customer. A bank or healthcare firm will come at you with endless feature requests, support requests etc. over things they claim is a regulatory requirement / they must have ASAP. You also might offer the first bank a discount because once you have one onboard its much easier to sell your product to others. They know a competitor has already done all the due diligence and decided you're safe, so the risk they spend months evaluating you to not be able to move forward is minimal.
- water-your-self 4y ago
  >maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD Errr.. I would hope you have at least 1, preferably more, replications outside of your own stack.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Well this is fascinating. There are other Gitlab hosting companies out there like GitlabHost[0] but interesting how the market will shift with Gitlab itself entering. [0]: https://gitlabhost.com https://gitlabhost.com
- zeeZ 4y ago
  With the way things have been going and them showing decreasing amount of care for smaller orgs and more push towards enterprise, I'm gonna say we'll see the discontinuation of at least some of the various official self-hosted packages for nonsense marketing keyword reasons.
jnsaff2 4y ago
Is this going to be more performant and less flaky/down? Can money be thrown at the one dedicated tenant being more performant? These were the big issues with at my previous client. The isolation/compliance/etc stuff had already been solved.
a_c 4y ago
I can see gitlab's appeal. I wonder if there is opensource connector that let SaaS company host their application on customer's choice of cloud? Or is there similar project?
water-your-self 4y ago
We heard you didnt like having all your source code scraped for our ML model so what if we silo you? Would that make you content when we eventually do our scraping again?
- roblabla 4y ago
  This is gitlab, not github. I'm not aware of gitlab doing any code scraping for ML models. Did I miss some news?
  - sco1 4y ago
    I guess this is why they couldn't call it GitLab Enterprise :)
daxelrod 4y ago
If I remember correctly, GitLab used to offer the same kind of service, but discontinued it because managing it was not a core competency that they wanted to focus on. I'm curious what's different now.
- deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- daxelrod 4y ago
  Ah yes, it was called GitHost. Here's the previous page for it https://web.archive.org/web/20190528091645/https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-hosted/#why-is-githost-shutting-down https://web.archive.org/web/20190528091645/https://about.git... . Note that the domain it used to be hosted at (GitHost dot Indian Ocean) is now a possibly-nsfw casino.
- lbotos 4y ago
  Scale. When I joined 6 years ago, there were 3 products with a team of about 120 people total. A tough decision was made to focus on 2 products to increase velocity. Probably about 2 years ago there were some asks if we offered "single-tenant cloud solutions". At around that time, we had really rock solid reference architectures that were well tested and confirmed to be scalable. We are now 2130 team members. There is demand, there is capacity, and there is clarity of how to run it. (6 Years ago "how big should the instance be for x users" was a question that was not answered yet.) Feel free to ask other questions, If I can answer them I will :)
  - daxelrod 4y ago
    Thank you for that answer! Wow, I can't believe how small the team was 6 years ago. Is that 120 engineers or 120 employees total? Looking forward to seeing GitLab doing this well. It hits a sweet spot for a lot of organizations.
    - 4y ago
sschueller 4y ago
Please don't let this be the kickoff to gitlab starting to remove the self-hosted option like Atlassian/Jira decided to do. I know it's open source and a fork would happen but I would prefer not going through this crap again like I am currently having to deal with Atlassian. What happens to all the premium features we pay for right now? They aren't open source.
- ccday 4y ago
  I don’t think GitLab will do this as they would lose many government customers that self-host on private networks.
  - sdmike1 4y ago
    They would lose us, that's for sure
  - sschueller 4y ago
    This sure looks like an attempt to move those into this solution.
    - sarki_247 4y ago
      GitLab team member here. No, it's not. This service will not be replacing our self-hosted versions.
    - koolba 4y ago
      There’s plenty of people that want dedicated deployments without having to manage the details of the deployment and upgrades. Especially those that already run their core on one of the target cloud platforms.
    - 0xffff2 4y ago
      At least for the US government, that's not going to happen. The government controls the servers is a non-negotiable contract term. We even have our own AWS regions for US government work.
jdoss 4y ago
A couple jobs ago we had to take our entire SaaS offering (security product) and reproduce it in the EU for GDPR. This exercise evolved into my Systems team being asked to create private deployments for a handful of Fortune 500 / Fortune 10 sales opportunities. The private deployment enabled Sales to land these Enterprise deals that were very risk adverse to having their data in a multi-tenant SaaS product. We ended up with around 10 of these private deployments and some very large big name customers. We did it entirely with Ansible on AWS or GCP on accounts owned by us. This was before Terraform was 1.0 and Ansible enabled us to quickly reproduce our deployments. It wasn't sexy or pretty. It worked well enough to get the job done. The best aspect of using this model is it gives your engineering team total control over the private SaaS deployment and unlimited access. Where as On-Prem or Customer Cloud deployments are an entire other bag of cats. It is great middle ground for Enterprise customers that won't do multi-tenant SaaS. I am only sharing this anecdote because I have seen this single-tenant SaaS model work in the past and I think more engineering teams should strive be able to reproduce their whole environments for private deployments.
- wara23arish 4y ago
  if you were to do this again today do you think terraform would be a better fit or maybe even something like pulumni?
  - jdoss 4y ago
    I would use Pulumi if I had to do it over again. I use the Pulumi Python SDK for some internal things at my work currently and it's so much better of a DX than fighting HCL all day. We actually tried to adopt Terraform early in 2015 but we hit some of the nasty state bugs back in version .05 or .06 IIRC and we hosed one of our deployments and couldn't recover. That burned the Terraform bridge for us and we just used Ansible to automate everything.
- croes 4y ago
  Wouldn't it nowadays be a violation of the GDPR? I mean AWS and GCP still are affected by the CloudAct, and if your company is US based they are too. I guess your anecdote happened during Safe Harbor or Privacy Shield.
gjvc 4y ago
https://code.onedev.io/ https://code.onedev.io/ is a good backup plan for when gitlab goes rogue.
dustedcodes 4y ago
This blog post as well as the GitLab blog doesn't load for me at the moment and times out. I know the "HN hug of death" can happen to anyone, but with GitLab's history I can't help myself and be very judgmental now.
- sytse 4y ago
  I checked a few minutes after your comment and right now and it loads fine for me. Maybe our DDoS protection routing people different?
- deleted 4y ago
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sqs 4y ago
Everyone assumes cloud == multi-tenant, but single-tenant cloud has a lot of benefits and is becoming more common: GitLab Dedicated is single-tenant, GitHub is prioritizing and rebuilding "GitHub AE" (their single-tenant cloud offering), and Sourcegraph (of which I am a cofounder) Cloud is single-tenant[1]. For self-hosted products, offering a single-tenant cloud product is much easier than multi-tenant because single-tenant cloud "just" requires automating and managing infrastructure, not completely changing the core application to support multi-tenancy. This also means nobody should be worried about self-hosted being deprecated in favor of a single-tenant cloud product; companies generally find it easy to keep both. Single-tenant cloud is also a lot more appealing to large customers because the security is (arguably) fundamentally better and scalability is easier to prove (you can just point to scalability on a self-hosted instance, which has the same scaling characteristics). Expect to see more single-tenant cloud offerings come out for dev tools, especially those that have a big self-hosted offering (like GitLab, GitHub, and Sourcegraph). [1] https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/enterprise-cloud https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/enterprise-cloud
- mooreds 4y ago
  I agree. At FusionAuth (my employer) we have a single tenant SaaS solution . I think this has legs and serves a real need. Interesting to note that you mentioning mostly devtime solutions (version control, source navigation). I think the proposition is even more compelling for components of your application that are used at runtime (like auth servers, databases or message queues). Wins for the company offering the self-hosted solution: * Easier to build the SaaS offering as you mention. * Can leverage same code for SaaS and self-hosted versions. * Unique value proposition: "run it yourself or let us run it, or migrate between these as needed" has been a compelling message for some of our clients Wins from the developer perspective: * Easier to version the tool like a library. No more surprise upgrades. Especially when you using a component that other pieces of code depend on, devs want control over the upgrade process. * No noisy neighbor problem (at least, no more than you'd have using a VM in a public cloud). * Still a SaaS, so you get ease of delivery/usage/maintenance. The major cons: * it costs more. * deployment time can take longer (you're not just adding a row in a database and configuring a hostname). * making sure folks know when/how to upgrade (it's still a learning experience for many devs to have a single tenant SaaS solution). I had an interesting discussion with the Cloudility folks about the three models for multi-tenancy: * logical (in a db) * with k8s namespaces * with VMs That's here: https://cloudify.co/blog/podcast-episode-twenty-five-the-end-of-terraform-as-a-golden-hammer/ https://cloudify.co/blog/podcast-episode-twenty-five-the-end...
maartendraijer 4y ago
It's an interesting move from GitLab. About 5 years ago they offered single-tenant hosting as well, but they shut down this service. Back then we had just started single-tenant GitLab hosting (focusing on the European market) and were a good alternative, so GitLab referred their single-tenant customers to us. Fast forward a couple of years and now they are back again. :) In the meantime we also started offering HA GitLab hosting (on AWS, GCP and Azure), so if you're interested but don't want to wait or don't have > 2000 seats, feel free to reach out: support <at> gitlabhost <dot> com or check out our website[0]. [0] https://gitlabhost.com/services/dedicated-high-availability-hosting/ https://gitlabhost.com/services/dedicated-high-availability-...
paxys 4y ago
What does single-tenant SaaS even mean? All of your company's data will be in a separate AWS account? Isolated Kuberentes cluster? Individual RDS instance? And how are you ensuring that the cloud provider you rely on is also single tenant? It is a meaningless term unless the service describes exactly how they are isolating customers (And it doesn't seem like they are in this post). In my experience the term is just used by salespeople to assure paranoid CIOs and nothing else.
- sa46 4y ago
  > What does single-tenant SaaS even mean? I'll attempt to explain to clarify my own understanding. SaaS is a delivery mechanism. Tenancy is an isolation model. To your broader point, the isolation model is implementation specific. Multi-tenant SaaS means a single deployment for all tenants, and the data is delivered over the internet. Single-tenant SaaS means a separate deployment for each tenant. I think common usage means a separate database per tenant. Single-tenant can also include entirely new infra for each tenant with private networking which is what Gitlab describes. HN thread on single-tenant DB experiences with lots of useful tidbits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305111
- cheriot 4y ago
  The press release says customers can pick the cloud and region they want to use so I suspect the answer will be 'yes' for those questions. A ~1000 person company I'm familiar with moved from GitHub to a self hosted GitHub because it was too easy for engineers to hit a button and accidentally publish a repository/gist to the public. That shouldn't matter, but sometimes it does. I'm not sure if that's the same on GitLab.
  - paxys 4y ago
    Sure but you can offer that with multi-tenant deployments in different regions.
    - cheriot 4y ago
      They're specifically saying it's single tenant. I suspect this is the same software as a self hosted GitLab, but where GitLab is operating it.
cultureulterior 4y ago
They already had this once before, then shut it down. Not sure why this time should be different?
JoshTriplett 4y ago
This looks great. I'd love to use something like this. The biggest thing I've been hoping for for years is a federated mechanism for handling clones and pull requests. Click "fork" on a repo on gitlab.com and get a fork on your single-tenant instance. Push changes to your fork, and open a federated pull request that ends up back on the original repo.
arsome 4y ago
How is this single tenant? Is it running on dedicated physical hardware or just difference instances on the same cloud provider?

222 points by mikece 4y ago

so no pricing and its offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product versus, say, a $24 a month vultr instance or something... if you had 60 devs using the service thats 14k a year. you could have one of them thats on payroll maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD and im not sure it would really matter. Is there something im missing?

chrisseaton 4y ago
> offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Even in those cases you'll usually see the enterprise option is 'call us'. I wouldn't make extreme assumptions based on the pricing model.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Yeah. That is the biggest cultural difference between "suit tech" and "t-shirt tech" - the old boomer-generation suits love personal connections and dealings of any kind, while the modern generation prefers efficiency and getting their work done without pseudo-social bullshit.
  - HatchedLake721 4y ago
    Nothing to do with t-shirts and suits. Enterprise deals can go anywhere between $50k and $10m+ per year. No one parts with that amount of money to “self serve” themselves by entering a credit card.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Credit cards vs invoicing seems orthogonal - this is about seeing a price up front.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Yeah, that's actually how much I pay for my instance on Vultr. Granted it's only a few users... It is a bit tricky at times to keep things up to date and secure enough, it would've been great to see a price tag for small teams or something. I mean, I do get that at that point (<= 5 devs) these guys (nor any other company of that size) actually cares about that particular case study since one could just stick to their free tier on the main site.
- lbotos 4y ago
  If you have any insights as to what makes it tricky to keep up to date I'm all ears. Would love to know: Single node? Omnibus or docker based? Making upgrades easier for all users is a core part of my plan for the next year (I work at GL)
  - pelagicAustral 4y ago
    I guess my comment was a bit misleading, what I meant was the entire sysop of having a single node (which is what I have) running smoothly. I mainly work development so at times having to tinker with the OS, keeping things up to date (including GL), secure, manage logs, etc can be quite time consuming. I do remember the first time I have a bit of a meltdown with the stage upgrade procedure. Granted the same thing can be said of any upgrade, you follow steps toward latest and greatest. But it was a bit of a job to get that up to date from the image provided by Vultr.
nixgeek 4y ago
Exact pricing is not listed, however if you dig around on GitLab’s site [1] it says Dedicated is for purchasers of >= 2000 seats of Ultimate, plus a management fee to cover defraying the infrastructure cost, and the time to look after it for you. From this even with generous discounting on those seats, I’d infer this is for customers willing to spend >$50k/mo or >$500k/yr. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/#pricing https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/...
Thaxll 4y ago
Comparing a SaaS solution to a cheap vps like vultr is completely missing the point.
senko 4y ago
> Is there something im missing? Yes. This is for big corporations who absolutely must not use shared/co-hosted/non-dedicated hardware, but don't want to maintain the thing themselves. We had several such customers at my previous startup; one of them was a bank, another was a popular household name, neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise if they only shopped for the cheapest option.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Cheaper than blame when there is a vendor snafu, compliance/regulatory risk and all that. It’s mostly a risk insurance premium.
- tallship 4y ago
  > neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise And therein lies the business model of throwing good money after bad, and that's not even taking into consideration the enormous cost benefits of self-hosting with one's own physically colocated hardware infra and a meager full time staff. Not batting an eye, or rather, "...so much as blinked", as you said, are bourne of business models with factored in wreckless budget kruft that may at first be acceptable until one merely scratches the surface of cost savings. Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... * Response time of support staff would be under 5 minutes. * Dedicated support staff would actually need to "dedicate" very little actual man-hours to support functions, freeing them up to have their budgeted labor resources allocated elsewhere in the company most of the time. This is a wonderfully stark and typical example of how to sell vendor lock-in for a FOSS solution... brilliant!
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... There's a bigger issue: security updates. With self-host, you have to subscribe to a ton of better-or-less-well-organized mailing lists, and once a 0-day is published you are in the race between your IT team and exploiters (who can and will find your instance on Shodan). In contrast, SaaS vendors (usually...) get informed about vulnerabilities prior to everyone else, so you don't have to worry about timely updates.
bmitc 4y ago
I have never understood why companies don't just publish pricing. It too often means pricing is just a game they want to play, for both personal and enterprise use, and it's a game I all too often don't want to play. If pricing is not available, I almost universally move on.
- a_c 4y ago
  Enterprise software is more willing to milk money from corporate than to leave money on the table. The amount of money a company is will to pay can be order of magnitudes higher than an enterprise software imagined. Hence SaaS company hire bunch of sales people/sales engineer to "understand your need", which is an euphemistic way of asking how deep your pocket is. And when everyone is doing this, you can't simply move on, there are only so much options. Of course, you could see it completely differently, private pricing means longer sales process, higher labour cost and fewer customer. Having tiered offering is common. This is actually what gitlab did, free plan, individual plans, business plan[1]. If you don't need worrying about data residency, you don't need contacting their sales at all. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
  - a_c 4y ago
    One more angle, when you are starting up, every bucks feel like coming out of your own pocket. When purchasing "enterprise plan", your company already attain certain size and you are spending your company's money, money that otherwise would not fall under your pocket anyway.
    - zeeZ 4y ago
      Or your startup is forced to look into "enterprise plans" due to necessary features for compliance being locked behind them, without having attained a certain size and "enterprise" money.
- cbzoiav 4y ago
  Because when you are dealing with corporates the amount of time needed can vary massively by customer. A bank or healthcare firm will come at you with endless feature requests, support requests etc. over things they claim is a regulatory requirement / they must have ASAP. You also might offer the first bank a discount because once you have one onboard its much easier to sell your product to others. They know a competitor has already done all the due diligence and decided you're safe, so the risk they spend months evaluating you to not be able to move forward is minimal.
water-your-self 4y ago
>maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD Errr.. I would hope you have at least 1, preferably more, replications outside of your own stack.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Well this is fascinating. There are other Gitlab hosting companies out there like GitlabHost[0] but interesting how the market will shift with Gitlab itself entering. [0]: https://gitlabhost.com https://gitlabhost.com

zeeZ 4y ago
With the way things have been going and them showing decreasing amount of care for smaller orgs and more push towards enterprise, I'm gonna say we'll see the discontinuation of at least some of the various official self-hosted packages for nonsense marketing keyword reasons.

jnsaff2 4y ago

Is this going to be more performant and less flaky/down? Can money be thrown at the one dedicated tenant being more performant? These were the big issues with at my previous client. The isolation/compliance/etc stuff had already been solved.

a_c 4y ago

I can see gitlab's appeal. I wonder if there is opensource connector that let SaaS company host their application on customer's choice of cloud? Or is there similar project?

water-your-self 4y ago

We heard you didnt like having all your source code scraped for our ML model so what if we silo you? Would that make you content when we eventually do our scraping again?

roblabla 4y ago
This is gitlab, not github. I'm not aware of gitlab doing any code scraping for ML models. Did I miss some news?
- sco1 4y ago
  I guess this is why they couldn't call it GitLab Enterprise :)

daxelrod 4y ago

If I remember correctly, GitLab used to offer the same kind of service, but discontinued it because managing it was not a core competency that they wanted to focus on. I'm curious what's different now.

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daxelrod 4y ago
Ah yes, it was called GitHost. Here's the previous page for it https://web.archive.org/web/20190528091645/https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-hosted/#why-is-githost-shutting-down https://web.archive.org/web/20190528091645/https://about.git... . Note that the domain it used to be hosted at (GitHost dot Indian Ocean) is now a possibly-nsfw casino.
lbotos 4y ago
Scale. When I joined 6 years ago, there were 3 products with a team of about 120 people total. A tough decision was made to focus on 2 products to increase velocity. Probably about 2 years ago there were some asks if we offered "single-tenant cloud solutions". At around that time, we had really rock solid reference architectures that were well tested and confirmed to be scalable. We are now 2130 team members. There is demand, there is capacity, and there is clarity of how to run it. (6 Years ago "how big should the instance be for x users" was a question that was not answered yet.) Feel free to ask other questions, If I can answer them I will :)
- daxelrod 4y ago
  Thank you for that answer! Wow, I can't believe how small the team was 6 years ago. Is that 120 engineers or 120 employees total? Looking forward to seeing GitLab doing this well. It hits a sweet spot for a lot of organizations.
  - 4y ago

sschueller 4y ago

Please don't let this be the kickoff to gitlab starting to remove the self-hosted option like Atlassian/Jira decided to do. I know it's open source and a fork would happen but I would prefer not going through this crap again like I am currently having to deal with Atlassian. What happens to all the premium features we pay for right now? They aren't open source.

ccday 4y ago
I don’t think GitLab will do this as they would lose many government customers that self-host on private networks.
- sdmike1 4y ago
  They would lose us, that's for sure
- sschueller 4y ago
  This sure looks like an attempt to move those into this solution.
  - sarki_247 4y ago
    GitLab team member here. No, it's not. This service will not be replacing our self-hosted versions.
  - koolba 4y ago
    There’s plenty of people that want dedicated deployments without having to manage the details of the deployment and upgrades. Especially those that already run their core on one of the target cloud platforms.
  - 0xffff2 4y ago
    At least for the US government, that's not going to happen. The government controls the servers is a non-negotiable contract term. We even have our own AWS regions for US government work.

jdoss 4y ago

A couple jobs ago we had to take our entire SaaS offering (security product) and reproduce it in the EU for GDPR. This exercise evolved into my Systems team being asked to create private deployments for a handful of Fortune 500 / Fortune 10 sales opportunities. The private deployment enabled Sales to land these Enterprise deals that were very risk adverse to having their data in a multi-tenant SaaS product. We ended up with around 10 of these private deployments and some very large big name customers. We did it entirely with Ansible on AWS or GCP on accounts owned by us. This was before Terraform was 1.0 and Ansible enabled us to quickly reproduce our deployments. It wasn't sexy or pretty. It worked well enough to get the job done. The best aspect of using this model is it gives your engineering team total control over the private SaaS deployment and unlimited access. Where as On-Prem or Customer Cloud deployments are an entire other bag of cats. It is great middle ground for Enterprise customers that won't do multi-tenant SaaS. I am only sharing this anecdote because I have seen this single-tenant SaaS model work in the past and I think more engineering teams should strive be able to reproduce their whole environments for private deployments.

wara23arish 4y ago
if you were to do this again today do you think terraform would be a better fit or maybe even something like pulumni?
- jdoss 4y ago
  I would use Pulumi if I had to do it over again. I use the Pulumi Python SDK for some internal things at my work currently and it's so much better of a DX than fighting HCL all day. We actually tried to adopt Terraform early in 2015 but we hit some of the nasty state bugs back in version .05 or .06 IIRC and we hosed one of our deployments and couldn't recover. That burned the Terraform bridge for us and we just used Ansible to automate everything.
croes 4y ago
Wouldn't it nowadays be a violation of the GDPR? I mean AWS and GCP still are affected by the CloudAct, and if your company is US based they are too. I guess your anecdote happened during Safe Harbor or Privacy Shield.

gjvc 4y ago

https://code.onedev.io/ https://code.onedev.io/ is a good backup plan for when gitlab goes rogue.

dustedcodes 4y ago

This blog post as well as the GitLab blog doesn't load for me at the moment and times out. I know the "HN hug of death" can happen to anyone, but with GitLab's history I can't help myself and be very judgmental now.

sytse 4y ago
I checked a few minutes after your comment and right now and it loads fine for me. Maybe our DDoS protection routing people different?
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sqs 4y ago

Everyone assumes cloud == multi-tenant, but single-tenant cloud has a lot of benefits and is becoming more common: GitLab Dedicated is single-tenant, GitHub is prioritizing and rebuilding "GitHub AE" (their single-tenant cloud offering), and Sourcegraph (of which I am a cofounder) Cloud is single-tenant[1]. For self-hosted products, offering a single-tenant cloud product is much easier than multi-tenant because single-tenant cloud "just" requires automating and managing infrastructure, not completely changing the core application to support multi-tenancy. This also means nobody should be worried about self-hosted being deprecated in favor of a single-tenant cloud product; companies generally find it easy to keep both. Single-tenant cloud is also a lot more appealing to large customers because the security is (arguably) fundamentally better and scalability is easier to prove (you can just point to scalability on a self-hosted instance, which has the same scaling characteristics). Expect to see more single-tenant cloud offerings come out for dev tools, especially those that have a big self-hosted offering (like GitLab, GitHub, and Sourcegraph). [1] https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/enterprise-cloud https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/enterprise-cloud

mooreds 4y ago
I agree. At FusionAuth (my employer) we have a single tenant SaaS solution . I think this has legs and serves a real need. Interesting to note that you mentioning mostly devtime solutions (version control, source navigation). I think the proposition is even more compelling for components of your application that are used at runtime (like auth servers, databases or message queues). Wins for the company offering the self-hosted solution: * Easier to build the SaaS offering as you mention. * Can leverage same code for SaaS and self-hosted versions. * Unique value proposition: "run it yourself or let us run it, or migrate between these as needed" has been a compelling message for some of our clients Wins from the developer perspective: * Easier to version the tool like a library. No more surprise upgrades. Especially when you using a component that other pieces of code depend on, devs want control over the upgrade process. * No noisy neighbor problem (at least, no more than you'd have using a VM in a public cloud). * Still a SaaS, so you get ease of delivery/usage/maintenance. The major cons: * it costs more. * deployment time can take longer (you're not just adding a row in a database and configuring a hostname). * making sure folks know when/how to upgrade (it's still a learning experience for many devs to have a single tenant SaaS solution). I had an interesting discussion with the Cloudility folks about the three models for multi-tenancy: * logical (in a db) * with k8s namespaces * with VMs That's here: https://cloudify.co/blog/podcast-episode-twenty-five-the-end-of-terraform-as-a-golden-hammer/ https://cloudify.co/blog/podcast-episode-twenty-five-the-end...

maartendraijer 4y ago

It's an interesting move from GitLab. About 5 years ago they offered single-tenant hosting as well, but they shut down this service. Back then we had just started single-tenant GitLab hosting (focusing on the European market) and were a good alternative, so GitLab referred their single-tenant customers to us. Fast forward a couple of years and now they are back again. :) In the meantime we also started offering HA GitLab hosting (on AWS, GCP and Azure), so if you're interested but don't want to wait or don't have > 2000 seats, feel free to reach out: support <at> gitlabhost <dot> com or check out our website[0]. [0] https://gitlabhost.com/services/dedicated-high-availability-hosting/ https://gitlabhost.com/services/dedicated-high-availability-...

paxys 4y ago

What does single-tenant SaaS even mean? All of your company's data will be in a separate AWS account? Isolated Kuberentes cluster? Individual RDS instance? And how are you ensuring that the cloud provider you rely on is also single tenant? It is a meaningless term unless the service describes exactly how they are isolating customers (And it doesn't seem like they are in this post). In my experience the term is just used by salespeople to assure paranoid CIOs and nothing else.

sa46 4y ago
> What does single-tenant SaaS even mean? I'll attempt to explain to clarify my own understanding. SaaS is a delivery mechanism. Tenancy is an isolation model. To your broader point, the isolation model is implementation specific. Multi-tenant SaaS means a single deployment for all tenants, and the data is delivered over the internet. Single-tenant SaaS means a separate deployment for each tenant. I think common usage means a separate database per tenant. Single-tenant can also include entirely new infra for each tenant with private networking which is what Gitlab describes. HN thread on single-tenant DB experiences with lots of useful tidbits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305111
cheriot 4y ago
The press release says customers can pick the cloud and region they want to use so I suspect the answer will be 'yes' for those questions. A ~1000 person company I'm familiar with moved from GitHub to a self hosted GitHub because it was too easy for engineers to hit a button and accidentally publish a repository/gist to the public. That shouldn't matter, but sometimes it does. I'm not sure if that's the same on GitLab.
- paxys 4y ago
  Sure but you can offer that with multi-tenant deployments in different regions.
  - cheriot 4y ago
    They're specifically saying it's single tenant. I suspect this is the same software as a self hosted GitLab, but where GitLab is operating it.

cultureulterior 4y ago

They already had this once before, then shut it down. Not sure why this time should be different?

JoshTriplett 4y ago

This looks great. I'd love to use something like this. The biggest thing I've been hoping for for years is a federated mechanism for handling clones and pull requests. Click "fork" on a repo on gitlab.com and get a fork on your single-tenant instance. Push changes to your fork, and open a federated pull request that ends up back on the original repo.

arsome 4y ago

How is this single tenant? Is it running on dedicated physical hardware or just difference instances on the same cloud provider?