Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

Official response: https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/897375110205722624

Disclaimer: I don't work for Gitlab.

The problem seems to be resolved now, seems like a problem with invalidated cache on a heavily loaded server ( official tweet: https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/897375110205722624) -- not data destruction.

Gitlab Issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/2320

I really really want to like Gitlab, I love their openness and I love having the competition with Github. But it seems like every 6 months they have an issue of some description.

It's unfortunate the expectations we place on cloud providers but my clients have similar expectations from me so I need to work with providers that can assure me they can offer the kind of uptime I'm expected to provide. Plus the modern way of pipelining code means git is seldom a static silo like it once was which only compounds things when one of your links in the chain has multiple glitches a year.

edit:

I thought I would get downvoted into oblivion for this but I felt it was a discussion worth having since they relate directly to my experiences with working at scale. So I "took one for the team" - so to speak.

Anyhow to answer a few points:

* Yes I'm aware git is a distributed VCS but like I said, git is seldom a silo so you'd need to reconfigure your pipeline to point to the new git origin or have your pipeline already configured to accept fallback systems. Quickly your configuration spirals in complexity.

* Yes I'm also aware you can self host. This is actually what we did do before moving to a cloud hosted solution. This added complications with our AWS pipelining. Problems that were solvable but again, with additional complexity compared with cloud hosted solutions.

At the end of the day all problems can be addressed with enough time and resources however the reason people typically opt for hosted solutions is to reduce complexity not increase it.

When you have CI/CD in place your central repo going down is a huge hassle.

I use gitlab for one thing, they allow private repos without paying.

My needs are pretty basic though, no CI/CD.

At some point I've even had multiple remotes in a repo, both on gitlab and github.