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Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

gitlab.com

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Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#21

Post by laumars »

luckytobby wrote: post #11
laumars wrote: post #6

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…

Everything was back on track very quickly, no data loss. Github has had major service outages recently as well (just google it to refresh your mind). They'll both have a few issues in the future because nobody is perfect. Come on.

> "because nobody is perfect. Come on."

If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :)

Sadly in the modern world people expect ridiculous uptimes and thus my expectations are just derived from my clients expectations. I don't like that much either but frankly clients often just get their expectations from their customers demands. These days people expect 24/7 uptime so my job is to facilitate that wherever I can.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#22

Post by mdekkers »

laumars wrote: post #6

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…

Really, HN? Parent might not be a _popular_ opinion, but the parent stated the opinion in a mature, non-inflammatory manner. Communities go downhill quickly when a certain "critical mass" of users get downvote rights, and downvoting becomes a poor proxy for intelligent discourse. It is deeply frustrating when a cool community such as HN increasingly stifles reasoned debate with the split second, zero cost decision of downvoting a comment you don´t agree with.

Remove downvoting, or increase the cost of downvoting (as in, one downvote will cost you 5 karma points, or something like that) because the HN I grew to enjoy is quickly starting to look like just another subreddit.

edit: typos

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#23

Post by mugsie »

laumars wrote: post #21
luckytobby wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything was back on track very quickly, no data loss. Github has had major service outages recently as well (just google it to refresh your mind). They'll both have a few issues in the future because nobody is perfect. Come on.

> "because nobody is perfect. Come on." If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :) Sadly in the modern world people expect ridiculous uptimes and thus my expectations are just derived from my clients expectations. I don't like that much either but frankly clients often just get their expectations from their customers demands. These days people expect 24/7 uptime so my jo…

Sure - but is there any alternatives? Gitlab does have issues, but so do GitHub (and other providers).

If your service is taken down by code hosting going away there is issues - unless you are running a code hosting service, or managed DevOps - in which case, the onus is on you to develop for failure (of any provider)

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#24

Post by Xylakant »

laumars wrote: post #21
luckytobby wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything was back on track very quickly, no data loss. Github has had major service outages recently as well (just google it to refresh your mind). They'll both have a few issues in the future because nobody is perfect. Come on.

> "because nobody is perfect. Come on." If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :) Sadly in the modern world people expect ridiculous uptimes and thus my expectations are just derived from my clients expectations. I don't like that much either but frankly clients often just get their expectations from their customers demands. These days people expect 24/7 uptime so my jo…

> If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :)

If you can't make that argument, then you indeed have a problem. Downtimes happen, reducing them gets expensive fast. 95% is fairly simple, 99.999 is extremely hard - it requires redundancy on each and every level. Every time a client demands this, I reframe their request in terms of required engineering effort. Few, if any, actually care about the 9 behind the decimal point after that.

The best clients had downtimes already integrated into their operating plans: What happens if we go down, partially or fully, what do we do, how do we communicate and - most importantly, how do we get back up as fast as possible again.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#25

Post by laumars »

jacquesm wrote: post #19
laumars wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory yes. But in practice it's not quite so straightforward. If you're working to tight deadlines then having to reconfigure your pipeline because of an outage is both scary and a huge pain in the arse. The reason people opt for cloud solutions is to decrease complexity, not increase it. So if I'm having to run multiple git origins then I would be better off self hosting and just moving those complexities in hou…

That's exactly why you can run your own gitlab instance. The thing to do when you don't want dependencies is to reduce your dependencies, not complain about a third party service that offers their software for free so you can run it yourself.

> That's exactly why you can run your own gitlab instance.

You're oversimplifying things there. It's not just about the physical instance - I could just run git "naked" without Gitlab's tooling if it were just an issue of installing Git. The complexities arise when you then need to have Git exposed to the internet to allow AWS pipelining to operate. We then have gateway into your internal network that needs to be PCI-compliant (for our retail sites), audited by the Gambling Commission (for our online games) and ISO nnnn (I forget what standard we meet off hand).

It's fair that most organisations might not have these hoops to jump through, but we do and hence why we migrated to hosted providers to remove some of our complexity.

> * The thing to do when you don't want dependencies is to reduce your dependencies, not complain about a third party service that offers their software for free so you can run it yourself.*

I think this is grossly unfair. For starters I'm not complaining about Gitlab, I was opening a discussion about them. You might disagree with my points and I welcome your opinion - otherwise it would be a dull and pointless discussion. :)

Secondly your point about "The thing to do when you don't want dependencies is to reduce your dependencies" is entirely the point I'm making. Perhaps you've missed some of the issues I've raised or perhaps I've explained myself badly. But I have explored a number of options and not just blindly talking out of my arse (which I appreciate there's no way for you to know this given the anonymous nature of the internet).

Lastly why would I be only interested in free solutions given the expectations I have? Currently we do pay for our Git hosting because of our requirements - and my expectations include paying a fee for a service if it solves a few problems. After all we are talking about enterprise systems - any reasonable costs are consolidated and billed back to the client.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#26

Post by laumars »

Xylakant wrote: post #24
laumars wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "because nobody is perfect. Come on." If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :) Sadly in the modern world people expect ridiculous uptimes and thus my expectations are just derived from my clients expectations. I don't like that much either but frankly clients often just get their expectations from their customers demands. These days people expect 24/7 uptime so my jo…

> If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :) If you can't make that argument, then you indeed have a problem. Downtimes happen, reducing them gets expensive fast. 95% is fairly simple, 99.999 is extremely hard - it requires redundancy on each and every level. Every time a client demands this, I reframe their request in terms of required engineering effort. Few, if any, a…

Your point is true for the smaller clients we work with but is an impossible ideology with the larger ones.

Without wanting to give away too much identifiable information, my clients include multiple major national publishers, a few international sports bodies, and one household console gaming brand.

They are businesses an order of magnitude larger than us and to compete for business you have to make some pretty serious pitches. Sadly uptime is usually one of their primary expectations. In fact one of our sports clients even demanded we have provisions in retain complete uptime during DDoS attacks! (though we did manage to negotiate a compromise on that requirement - thankfully)

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#27

Post by jacquesm »

laumars wrote: post #25
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why you can run your own gitlab instance. The thing to do when you don't want dependencies is to reduce your dependencies, not complain about a third party service that offers their software for free so you can run it yourself.

> That's exactly why you can run your own gitlab instance. You're oversimplifying things there. It's not just about the physical instance - I could just run git "naked" without Gitlab's tooling if it were just an issue of installing Git. The complexities arise when you then need to have Git exposed to the internet to allow AWS pipelining to operate. We then have gateway into your internal network that needs to be PCI…

> I think this is grossly unfair.

No, I think you are grossly unfair. You write that you 'really, really want to like gitlab', harp on them having 'issues every few months' (as if there is any online service that does not have issues every few months, and which blows this particular issue up to a magnitude it does not deserve) and then present a use-case that gitlab offers the perfect solution for, which you reject for reasons all your own.

Sounds to me like you are making a problem rather than using tools in the ways they are intended. Whether the solution is paid or not is not the relevant bit, the relevant bit is that you have the option to self-host which you do not with gitlab's main competitors.

Your AWS complexities are not gitlab's problem, they are yours.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#28

Post by laumars »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
laumars wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's exactly why you can run your own gitlab instance. You're oversimplifying things there. It's not just about the physical instance - I could just run git "naked" without Gitlab's tooling if it were just an issue of installing Git. The complexities arise when you then need to have Git exposed to the internet to allow AWS pipelining to operate. We then have gateway into your internal network that needs to be PCI…

> I think this is grossly unfair. No, I think you are grossly unfair. You write that you 'really, really want to like gitlab', harp on them having 'issues every few months' (as if there is any online service that does not have issues every few months, and which blows this particular issue up to a magnitude it does not deserve) and then present a use-case that gitlab offers the perfect solution for, which you reject f…

Like I said before, we were already self hosting (albeit not with Gitlab's tooling) before moving to a hosted solution. If it were as easy as you claim it to be then we would never have switched aware from self hosting. I am a control freak so I actually prefer self hosting myself. But it was steadily becoming impractical.

I apologize if I've badly explained the problems we encountered. But please don't assume I'm some idiot who doesn't know what I'm doing just because your business has it's own different set of requirements than ours.

> "Your AWS complexities are not gitlab's problem, they are yours.*

I'm not blaming Gitlab. I'm saying AWS complexities make some solutions infeasible. I also said some of the compliance regulations we adhere to also add complexities that make some solutions less practical. I really don't understand why are you being so abrasive about this.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#29

Post by ergo14 »

chrisBob wrote: post #18
ergo14 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try RhodeCode, you will get both mercurial and git. Since I prefer Mercurial over git I don't have any other option than to run my own instance.

Try bitbucket. We use it at work and it is a nice service that includes Mercurial support

But you can't self host bitbucket with mercurial support? I thought only the online version supports hg?

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#30

Post by [deleted] »

laumars wrote: post #21
luckytobby wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything was back on track very quickly, no data loss. Github has had major service outages recently as well (just google it to refresh your mind). They'll both have a few issues in the future because nobody is perfect. Come on.

> "because nobody is perfect. Come on." If only I could make the same counterargument when my clients complain about downtime. :) Sadly in the modern world people expect ridiculous uptimes and thus my expectations are just derived from my clients expectations. I don't like that much either but frankly clients often just get their expectations from their customers demands. These days people expect 24/7 uptime so my jo…

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