14 ms·

Ending support for self-hosted Gitpod and moving our source to AGPL

102 points by ghuntley 4y ago

alphabettsy 4y ago
Is there enough of a community around Gitpod for it to be supported that way?
- ghuntley 4y ago
  Unfortunately no. It is stupidly complex to be able to contribute to Gitpod as the build tooling (werft) automation is only accessible to employees thus a community never formed. During my time there I tried to get this resolved and implement some form of automation around community contribution w/CLA but both of these problems went no-where/were not prioritised. Have opened https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/15254 https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/15254 for discussions re: if CLA is still needed after todays announcement.
studmuffin650 4y ago
Interested to see if they can successfully pivot to full SaaS. It seems like with the recent AWS announcement of CodeCatalyst and Github CodeSpaces (both of which are free with an additional easy to use paid model), Gitpod has been backed into a corner. I hope they do well, but the odds are stacked against them as the enterprise selling machines that are Amazon and Microsoft are incredibly difficult to fight as a startup. With Gitlab also apparently working on their version of CodeSpaces, it seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian).
- ghuntley 4y ago
  > It seems like with the recent AWS announcement of CodeCatalyst I took Code Catalyst for a spin the other day and it is terrible. https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1599773293128863744 https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15997732931288637... > It seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian) I agree. I used to work there and think they need to slash circa 40 employees to shrink down to more sustainable burn rate numbers - https://ghuntley.com/tea https://ghuntley.com/tea > but the odds are stacked against them In more ways then one https://ghuntley.com/fracture https://ghuntley.com/fracture documents Microsoft's strategy with Visual Studio Code which means 6 out of 10 top programming languages integrations only work on GitHub Codepaces. If you want .NET, C++, C, Python or Jupyter then the LSP integrations cannot be legally used on Gitpod. GitHub Codespaces got one thing right - they chose IaaS as the brick of compute meaning they can do GPUs and run Kubernetes clusters. On Gitpod, you can't because Gitpod chose Kubernetes as the compute abstraction. Gitpod needs to ditch Kubernetes... https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/4889 https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/4889 and https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/10650 https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/10650
  - mmq 4y ago
    How is Coder going to compete against GH/MSFT?
    - ghuntley 4y ago
      Hmm. We find that GH/MSFT customers come to us (especially Microsoft Azure DevOps customers which have been abandoned) and GH is categorically providing non-answers of "we are investigating offering on-prem" but they have done that for a long time now - ie. a classic sales tactic to keep MSFT aligned people hopeful vs saying no. Microsoft has been retiring on-prem products as a business strategy for over 12 years now. Why would GitHub be the snowflake exception? Somewhere, in some CVP's mind GitHub ES is already EOL (look at GitHub.com/enterprise they are already muddling the meaning of "enterprise") If you look at /.codespaces/bin or /workspaces/.codespaces/shared on GitHub Codespaces you'll understand how tightly coupled GitHub Codespaces is to Microsoft Azure thus on-prem isn't going to happen. The likely path they could do it would be like JetBrains Spaces does it "configure in our IAM/ARM key and we will provision Azure/AWS virtual machines" via GitHub Enterprise Server. $ ghuntley /workspaces/.codespaces/shared $ grep sku * environment-variables.json: "skuName": "Standard_F2s_v2", If you want further information check out https://coder.com/blog/github-codespaces-coder-and-enterprise-customers https://coder.com/blog/github-codespaces-coder-and-enterpris...
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        MS have a VS code server which is in private preview now. it's very much like a self-hosted Codespace if you squint and write a tiny bit of automation around it. license forbids using it to host a service for others, but you can host it for yourself.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - pas 4y ago
    > the LSP integrations cannot be legally used on Gitpod. Can the user install them? How complicated these are? Is there some awareness about this in OSS communities? If yes, is there some kind of consensus? (Is it something like: okay, then each programming language project needs to provide its LSP, like Rust has rust-analyzer, Scala has Metals, etc..?)
- jlandgraf 4y ago
  CEO of Gitpod here - we just announced a $25m Series A last month (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/future-of-software-cdes https://www.gitpod.io/blog/future-of-software-cdes), so not looking to get acquired anytime soon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ On the market landscape: the whole market around CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde https://www.gitpod.io/cde) is in its infancy. Our largest competition is local development. We believe that unlike for other creative workflows the convenience threshold for development in the cloud has not (yet) been crossed. We are moving away from self hosted to execute faster on what we always wanted: from history-dependent cobbled local development environments to consistently reproducible, instant, ephemeral Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). You can think of CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde https://www.gitpod.io/cde) as our product north star. Other links: - How Redmonk looks at the market https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/12/01/the-year-of-the-cloud-development-environment/ https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/12/01/the-year-of-the-clo... - Kent Beck https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/cloud-development-environments-tame-complexity-by-reducing-state-4a154ea7959f https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/cloud-development-environm... (full disclosure: Kent invested in the meantime into the company)
- jlengrand 4y ago
  in my dreams they get acquired by Jetbrains :D
  - ghuntley 4y ago
    me too then the stock in Gitpod that I own might become liquid :)
blueflow 4y ago
We were currently evaluating using GitPod in conjunction with our on-premise GitLab instance. This move by GitPod rugpulled the idea from us since we are handling national (non US) classified data and aren't allowed to upload that data or anything related to it to Cloud companies. Edit: Misunderstanding, we are only evaluating GitPod, we already have a on-premise Gitlab instance.
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  Does code-server[1] meet your needs? It's self hosted and has been meeting by (albeit) hobbyist needs well. [1] https://github.com/coder/code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Personally i always opposed new projects like this, since we already have a big devops stack that is taking much manpower to operate and kept running reliably. So, yes, the rugpull is not in the interest of my company, but it is in my interest because i will have less operational responsibility.
  - ghuntley 4y ago
    Maintainer of code-server here (:wave:). A couple days ago we did a recap of the ecosystem of code-server and how people are deploying code-server to support multiple users. See https://coder.com/blog/code-server-multiple-users https://coder.com/blog/code-server-multiple-users
- nixgeek 4y ago
  I assume GitHub Enterprise Server would also meet the requirements for being entirely on-premise and not uploading data to the clouds?
  - blueflow 4y ago
    It does meet these requirements, by force. The network topology does not allow our on-premise instance to phone home.
toastal 4y ago
Why doesn't this link to the main website? GitHub is not a blogging platform and this is a mess to read.
- capableweb 4y ago
  How is this "a mess"? Two first things (table, html/js) is a bit ugly, but the rest reads completely fine. Where is your limit for when something "becomes a mess"?
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    My limit is when the links don’t work. Which they don’t because they expect this to be on the website.
  - jlund-molfese 4y ago
    In addition to the links, <script context="module"> export const prerender = true; </script> <script> import Signup from "$lib/components/dedicated/signup.svelte" </script> is noisy
- npslvr 4y ago
  do any of the links from github.com/gitpod-io/website/blob/main/src/routes/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated.md work...?
- electroly 4y ago
  Here's the real site link, I don't know why the poster here used the source markdown. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
colejohnson66 4y ago
Link to the actual webpage, not the GitHub source: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated
- ghuntley 4y ago
  Link to the community standup which occurred moments ago that explains rationale and reveals the archictecture of their Gitpod Dedicated offering. https://youtu.be/B83zRiP9uk8 https://youtu.be/B83zRiP9uk8
Alacart 4y ago
This seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do, with the difficulties of supporting self hosted for a product like this on the infinite variety of customer setups. I can't imagine the time sink it must have been trying to support them all, it can't have been profitable. It sounds like the dedicated version essentially lets enterprises run in on their own accounts while letting gitpod manage everything, which seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. Also sounds like you can still self host, they just won't support it directly as a customer, which again, seems reasonable.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  They really shouldn't have to do much support. You can do self-hosted a number of ways: ship a VM, ship a container, ship a static binary, ship some automation (ansible/terraform/etc). It doesn't matter where it's run or how after that point, because it's a commodity building block. It's up to the customer to figure out how to set it up. But once it's running, troubleshooting it is the same everywhere. Can you perform network operation X? Y? Z? Is the process doing A? Is the VM in state B? Is the VM's OS up to date and on version C/D/E? It's all just basic networking and basic Linux systems administration. Other vendors do the same thing. If you know what you're doing, self-hosted should be a small, well-understood feature of your overall offering. The fact that they're going full-cloud is more likely a factor of just not having a strong engineering organization, and seeing more money coming from their cloud offering from small players that don't do self-hosted. Later on they will want the whale money and go back to self-hosted, or they'll get their lunch eaten by the other players in this market.
  - Alacart 4y ago
    I think you may have missed that they do indeed let you sort of self host, in that you can run it on your own AWS resources. They just need access to manage it for you. Which I'd think would cover most orgs requirements out there that would actually use gitpod, but I could be wrong. I think in this particular case it's maybe not quite as easy as just shipping a container or whatever, because a huge amount of the value and effort is actually the orchestration of VMs/containers/however they do it under the hood. Again, I might just not know enough here, but it seems more like they've constrained their self hosted option a bit to keep it manageable rather than getting rid of it in practice. It also seems like you could just use the agpl licensed open source code if you want? Finally, it seems unfair to characterize them as having a weak engineering culture when they've managed to create something rather impressive with, I think(?), quite a small team.
DishyDev 4y ago
I think Gitpod is a great product, and I've had a massive amount of use of their free tier. There's something pleasant about throwaway Ubuntu development environments. I can cover pretty much all of the major development use cases in it, even container work. I just hope they survive long enough to take off as they're giving a lot away for free currently. Their dedicated instance setup looks like it'll cover the majority of businesses who'll likely have their own landing zones and cloud controls they can integrate into. Not being able to self host is a loss, but it might the right trade off. I don't understand the AGPL bit well other than it was seen like poison by corporate risk types at my previous jobs.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
i dont understand. gitpod self hosted is gone and source is agpl so can someone continue a fork of gitpod self hosted?
- ezekg 4y ago
  I think the point is that they no longer support self-hosting. You can still self-host it, since it's AGPL after all, but they probably won't help you nor document how to self-host. This effectively pushes enterprises from self-hosting to their new Dedicated offering.
  - ghuntley 4y ago
    Correct.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > This effectively pushes enterprises from self-hosting to their new Dedicated offering. Or, of course, into the arms of their competitors.
    - ezekg 4y ago
      Maybe. But it sounds like their current enterprise customers were tired of managing the complex environment that the application requires. So with that, this seems like a good move by them. Probably not for everybody, of course. But this positions their enterprise business model from on-prem to SaaS, which from the blog post is exactly what they want.
raverbashing 4y ago
> The open-ended requirements to run on commoditised Kubernetes services (GKE, AKS, EKS) forced us to manage variance and prevented us from driving innovation and fully realizing the potential of Cloud Really? Looks like they shot their own foot there "On-prem" usually doesn't mean "running on AWS but managed by us". Sure, some people will want it, but not most of them.
nyadesu 4y ago
Great product, sounds like a reasonable move. Hope Gitpod can keep growing and improving even more
- ghuntley 4y ago
  Yup, it is. I'm glad they have finally made their mind up if they are a on-prem company or a SaaS company. Who you hire and how software is built (and sold) is a fundamentally different approach to market. For example - it doesn't make sense to hire product managers from Slack if you are building on-prem (they don't have experience // product managers from RedHat should have been hired for an on-prem play)...
endigma 4y ago
I understand why they've done it, but I now consider this DOA. Open source without self hosting capability is just crowdsourcing your engineering team. Documented and supported or bust. The cloud is a prison.
- numbsafari 4y ago
  I completely agree. It’s a full non-starter for us to run this on someone else’s infrastructure. I was going to be looking hard at GitPod in 2023. That is now entirely off the table.
  - kjksf 4y ago
    And you're going to use what instead? If the answer is "nothing" then you don't really need it so it was never on the table.
  - jlandgraf 4y ago
    With your infrastructure you mean actual hardware? Bc we can run Gitpod Dedicated in your cloud account or ours, in the region of your choice.
    - mikenikles 4y ago
      What about multi-region for anyone who has a remote team?
    - thewataccount 4y ago
      I'm a random developer that would be using it currently for local use. I cannot/will not consider a solution that results in you directly managing or hosting my code/projects. I know many companies that would also take issue because of this. Also I understand you're pivoting your customer base to enterprises and not the random hobbyist - but obviously I cannot afford enterprise pricing. That's why many of us are sad to see this no longer be an option for us.
      - deleted 4y ago
tristan957 4y ago
I hope Gitpod can continue to be successful given Microsoft seems to be doing their best to work against them through the horrible licensing of many popular VSCode extensions.
- ghuntley 4y ago
  Agreed. Gitpod is the best chance of unfucking the VSCode LSP ecosystem but it's going to not be cheap or easy to do. 'pod will need to reauthor any of the LSPs that Microsoft developed but even if they do it won't resolve the dependency graph issues of Jupyter Extension depending upon Pylance Extension. As Microsoft goes up the stack past LSPs building more IDE chrome it is just going to get harder as graph is going to get more tangled...
phillipcarter 4y ago
Overall, I am glad that this shift in direction is happening for Gitpod. They are still leading the CDE movement (IMO) and this gives them a better chance at continuing to do that. I don't want this space to collapse into just use codespaces, it's mediocre, but whatever because innovators businesses couldn't keep their products alive long-term. Official support just doesn't feel like it was ever a money-maker, nor is it something that the target audience would really use IMO, at least not now.
- ghuntley 4y ago
  100% agree.
IceWreck 4y ago
Still self hosted alternative https://coder.com https://coder.com and Eclipse Che https://www.eclipse.org/che/ https://www.eclipse.org/che/. Both of them allow you to host VSCode or Theia on your own infrastructure.

102 points by ghuntley 4y ago

alphabettsy 4y ago

Is there enough of a community around Gitpod for it to be supported that way?

ghuntley 4y ago
Unfortunately no. It is stupidly complex to be able to contribute to Gitpod as the build tooling (werft) automation is only accessible to employees thus a community never formed. During my time there I tried to get this resolved and implement some form of automation around community contribution w/CLA but both of these problems went no-where/were not prioritised. Have opened https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/15254 https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/15254 for discussions re: if CLA is still needed after todays announcement.

studmuffin650 4y ago

Interested to see if they can successfully pivot to full SaaS. It seems like with the recent AWS announcement of CodeCatalyst and Github CodeSpaces (both of which are free with an additional easy to use paid model), Gitpod has been backed into a corner. I hope they do well, but the odds are stacked against them as the enterprise selling machines that are Amazon and Microsoft are incredibly difficult to fight as a startup. With Gitlab also apparently working on their version of CodeSpaces, it seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian).

ghuntley 4y ago
> It seems like with the recent AWS announcement of CodeCatalyst I took Code Catalyst for a spin the other day and it is terrible. https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1599773293128863744 https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15997732931288637... > It seems like maybe the best position for Gitpod is an acquisition (possibly by Atlassian) I agree. I used to work there and think they need to slash circa 40 employees to shrink down to more sustainable burn rate numbers - https://ghuntley.com/tea https://ghuntley.com/tea > but the odds are stacked against them In more ways then one https://ghuntley.com/fracture https://ghuntley.com/fracture documents Microsoft's strategy with Visual Studio Code which means 6 out of 10 top programming languages integrations only work on GitHub Codepaces. If you want .NET, C++, C, Python or Jupyter then the LSP integrations cannot be legally used on Gitpod. GitHub Codespaces got one thing right - they chose IaaS as the brick of compute meaning they can do GPUs and run Kubernetes clusters. On Gitpod, you can't because Gitpod chose Kubernetes as the compute abstraction. Gitpod needs to ditch Kubernetes... https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/4889 https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/4889 and https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/10650 https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/issues/10650
- mmq 4y ago
  How is Coder going to compete against GH/MSFT?
  - ghuntley 4y ago
    Hmm. We find that GH/MSFT customers come to us (especially Microsoft Azure DevOps customers which have been abandoned) and GH is categorically providing non-answers of "we are investigating offering on-prem" but they have done that for a long time now - ie. a classic sales tactic to keep MSFT aligned people hopeful vs saying no. Microsoft has been retiring on-prem products as a business strategy for over 12 years now. Why would GitHub be the snowflake exception? Somewhere, in some CVP's mind GitHub ES is already EOL (look at GitHub.com/enterprise they are already muddling the meaning of "enterprise") If you look at /.codespaces/bin or /workspaces/.codespaces/shared on GitHub Codespaces you'll understand how tightly coupled GitHub Codespaces is to Microsoft Azure thus on-prem isn't going to happen. The likely path they could do it would be like JetBrains Spaces does it "configure in our IAM/ARM key and we will provision Azure/AWS virtual machines" via GitHub Enterprise Server. $ ghuntley /workspaces/.codespaces/shared $ grep sku * environment-variables.json: "skuName": "Standard_F2s_v2", If you want further information check out https://coder.com/blog/github-codespaces-coder-and-enterprise-customers https://coder.com/blog/github-codespaces-coder-and-enterpris...
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      MS have a VS code server which is in private preview now. it's very much like a self-hosted Codespace if you squint and write a tiny bit of automation around it. license forbids using it to host a service for others, but you can host it for yourself.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- pas 4y ago
  > the LSP integrations cannot be legally used on Gitpod. Can the user install them? How complicated these are? Is there some awareness about this in OSS communities? If yes, is there some kind of consensus? (Is it something like: okay, then each programming language project needs to provide its LSP, like Rust has rust-analyzer, Scala has Metals, etc..?)
jlandgraf 4y ago
CEO of Gitpod here - we just announced a $25m Series A last month (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/future-of-software-cdes https://www.gitpod.io/blog/future-of-software-cdes), so not looking to get acquired anytime soon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ On the market landscape: the whole market around CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde https://www.gitpod.io/cde) is in its infancy. Our largest competition is local development. We believe that unlike for other creative workflows the convenience threshold for development in the cloud has not (yet) been crossed. We are moving away from self hosted to execute faster on what we always wanted: from history-dependent cobbled local development environments to consistently reproducible, instant, ephemeral Cloud Development Environments (CDEs). You can think of CDEs (https://www.gitpod.io/cde https://www.gitpod.io/cde) as our product north star. Other links: - How Redmonk looks at the market https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/12/01/the-year-of-the-cloud-development-environment/ https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/2022/12/01/the-year-of-the-clo... - Kent Beck https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/cloud-development-environments-tame-complexity-by-reducing-state-4a154ea7959f https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/cloud-development-environm... (full disclosure: Kent invested in the meantime into the company)
jlengrand 4y ago
in my dreams they get acquired by Jetbrains :D
- ghuntley 4y ago
  me too then the stock in Gitpod that I own might become liquid :)

blueflow 4y ago

We were currently evaluating using GitPod in conjunction with our on-premise GitLab instance. This move by GitPod rugpulled the idea from us since we are handling national (non US) classified data and aren't allowed to upload that data or anything related to it to Cloud companies. Edit: Misunderstanding, we are only evaluating GitPod, we already have a on-premise Gitlab instance.

stevewatson301 4y ago
Does code-server[1] meet your needs? It's self hosted and has been meeting by (albeit) hobbyist needs well. [1] https://github.com/coder/code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server
- blueflow 4y ago
  Personally i always opposed new projects like this, since we already have a big devops stack that is taking much manpower to operate and kept running reliably. So, yes, the rugpull is not in the interest of my company, but it is in my interest because i will have less operational responsibility.
- ghuntley 4y ago
  Maintainer of code-server here (:wave:). A couple days ago we did a recap of the ecosystem of code-server and how people are deploying code-server to support multiple users. See https://coder.com/blog/code-server-multiple-users https://coder.com/blog/code-server-multiple-users
nixgeek 4y ago
I assume GitHub Enterprise Server would also meet the requirements for being entirely on-premise and not uploading data to the clouds?
- blueflow 4y ago
  It does meet these requirements, by force. The network topology does not allow our on-premise instance to phone home.

toastal 4y ago

Why doesn't this link to the main website? GitHub is not a blogging platform and this is a mess to read.

capableweb 4y ago
How is this "a mess"? Two first things (table, html/js) is a bit ugly, but the rest reads completely fine. Where is your limit for when something "becomes a mess"?
- Semaphor 4y ago
  My limit is when the links don’t work. Which they don’t because they expect this to be on the website.
- jlund-molfese 4y ago
  In addition to the links, <script context="module"> export const prerender = true; </script> <script> import Signup from "$lib/components/dedicated/signup.svelte" </script> is noisy
npslvr 4y ago
do any of the links from github.com/gitpod-io/website/blob/main/src/routes/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated.md work...?
electroly 4y ago
Here's the real site link, I don't know why the poster here used the source markdown. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

colejohnson66 4y ago

Link to the actual webpage, not the GitHub source: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated https://www.gitpod.io/blog/introducing-gitpod-dedicated

ghuntley 4y ago
Link to the community standup which occurred moments ago that explains rationale and reveals the archictecture of their Gitpod Dedicated offering. https://youtu.be/B83zRiP9uk8 https://youtu.be/B83zRiP9uk8

Alacart 4y ago

This seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do, with the difficulties of supporting self hosted for a product like this on the infinite variety of customer setups. I can't imagine the time sink it must have been trying to support them all, it can't have been profitable. It sounds like the dedicated version essentially lets enterprises run in on their own accounts while letting gitpod manage everything, which seems like a reasonable middle ground to me. Also sounds like you can still self host, they just won't support it directly as a customer, which again, seems reasonable.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
They really shouldn't have to do much support. You can do self-hosted a number of ways: ship a VM, ship a container, ship a static binary, ship some automation (ansible/terraform/etc). It doesn't matter where it's run or how after that point, because it's a commodity building block. It's up to the customer to figure out how to set it up. But once it's running, troubleshooting it is the same everywhere. Can you perform network operation X? Y? Z? Is the process doing A? Is the VM in state B? Is the VM's OS up to date and on version C/D/E? It's all just basic networking and basic Linux systems administration. Other vendors do the same thing. If you know what you're doing, self-hosted should be a small, well-understood feature of your overall offering. The fact that they're going full-cloud is more likely a factor of just not having a strong engineering organization, and seeing more money coming from their cloud offering from small players that don't do self-hosted. Later on they will want the whale money and go back to self-hosted, or they'll get their lunch eaten by the other players in this market.
- Alacart 4y ago
  I think you may have missed that they do indeed let you sort of self host, in that you can run it on your own AWS resources. They just need access to manage it for you. Which I'd think would cover most orgs requirements out there that would actually use gitpod, but I could be wrong. I think in this particular case it's maybe not quite as easy as just shipping a container or whatever, because a huge amount of the value and effort is actually the orchestration of VMs/containers/however they do it under the hood. Again, I might just not know enough here, but it seems more like they've constrained their self hosted option a bit to keep it manageable rather than getting rid of it in practice. It also seems like you could just use the agpl licensed open source code if you want? Finally, it seems unfair to characterize them as having a weak engineering culture when they've managed to create something rather impressive with, I think(?), quite a small team.

DishyDev 4y ago

I think Gitpod is a great product, and I've had a massive amount of use of their free tier. There's something pleasant about throwaway Ubuntu development environments. I can cover pretty much all of the major development use cases in it, even container work. I just hope they survive long enough to take off as they're giving a lot away for free currently. Their dedicated instance setup looks like it'll cover the majority of businesses who'll likely have their own landing zones and cloud controls they can integrate into. Not being able to self host is a loss, but it might the right trade off. I don't understand the AGPL bit well other than it was seen like poison by corporate risk types at my previous jobs.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

i dont understand. gitpod self hosted is gone and source is agpl so can someone continue a fork of gitpod self hosted?

ezekg 4y ago
I think the point is that they no longer support self-hosting. You can still self-host it, since it's AGPL after all, but they probably won't help you nor document how to self-host. This effectively pushes enterprises from self-hosting to their new Dedicated offering.
- ghuntley 4y ago
  Correct.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > This effectively pushes enterprises from self-hosting to their new Dedicated offering. Or, of course, into the arms of their competitors.
  - ezekg 4y ago
    Maybe. But it sounds like their current enterprise customers were tired of managing the complex environment that the application requires. So with that, this seems like a good move by them. Probably not for everybody, of course. But this positions their enterprise business model from on-prem to SaaS, which from the blog post is exactly what they want.

raverbashing 4y ago

> The open-ended requirements to run on commoditised Kubernetes services (GKE, AKS, EKS) forced us to manage variance and prevented us from driving innovation and fully realizing the potential of Cloud Really? Looks like they shot their own foot there "On-prem" usually doesn't mean "running on AWS but managed by us". Sure, some people will want it, but not most of them.

nyadesu 4y ago

Great product, sounds like a reasonable move. Hope Gitpod can keep growing and improving even more

ghuntley 4y ago
Yup, it is. I'm glad they have finally made their mind up if they are a on-prem company or a SaaS company. Who you hire and how software is built (and sold) is a fundamentally different approach to market. For example - it doesn't make sense to hire product managers from Slack if you are building on-prem (they don't have experience // product managers from RedHat should have been hired for an on-prem play)...

endigma 4y ago

I understand why they've done it, but I now consider this DOA. Open source without self hosting capability is just crowdsourcing your engineering team. Documented and supported or bust. The cloud is a prison.

numbsafari 4y ago
I completely agree. It’s a full non-starter for us to run this on someone else’s infrastructure. I was going to be looking hard at GitPod in 2023. That is now entirely off the table.
- kjksf 4y ago
  And you're going to use what instead? If the answer is "nothing" then you don't really need it so it was never on the table.
- jlandgraf 4y ago
  With your infrastructure you mean actual hardware? Bc we can run Gitpod Dedicated in your cloud account or ours, in the region of your choice.
  - mikenikles 4y ago
    What about multi-region for anyone who has a remote team?
  - thewataccount 4y ago
    I'm a random developer that would be using it currently for local use. I cannot/will not consider a solution that results in you directly managing or hosting my code/projects. I know many companies that would also take issue because of this. Also I understand you're pivoting your customer base to enterprises and not the random hobbyist - but obviously I cannot afford enterprise pricing. That's why many of us are sad to see this no longer be an option for us.
    - deleted 4y ago

tristan957 4y ago

I hope Gitpod can continue to be successful given Microsoft seems to be doing their best to work against them through the horrible licensing of many popular VSCode extensions.

ghuntley 4y ago
Agreed. Gitpod is the best chance of unfucking the VSCode LSP ecosystem but it's going to not be cheap or easy to do. 'pod will need to reauthor any of the LSPs that Microsoft developed but even if they do it won't resolve the dependency graph issues of Jupyter Extension depending upon Pylance Extension. As Microsoft goes up the stack past LSPs building more IDE chrome it is just going to get harder as graph is going to get more tangled...

phillipcarter 4y ago

Overall, I am glad that this shift in direction is happening for Gitpod. They are still leading the CDE movement (IMO) and this gives them a better chance at continuing to do that. I don't want this space to collapse into just use codespaces, it's mediocre, but whatever because innovators businesses couldn't keep their products alive long-term. Official support just doesn't feel like it was ever a money-maker, nor is it something that the target audience would really use IMO, at least not now.

ghuntley 4y ago
100% agree.

IceWreck 4y ago

Still self hosted alternative https://coder.com https://coder.com and Eclipse Che https://www.eclipse.org/che/ https://www.eclipse.org/che/. Both of them allow you to host VSCode or Theia on your own infrastructure.