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Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

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Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#31

Post by jacquesm »

laumars wrote: post #28
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

Because your initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively without them necessarily being the party that deserves your scorn.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#32

Post by pbecotte »

laumars wrote: post #26
Xylakant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 seri…

If you are selling your clients those types of guarantees, then you aren't going to be able to rely on a public service with less reliability than your guarantee. Which probably means you are out of luck... I can't imagine it is worth it financially for github or gitlab to pay for too many 9s. Of course, based on your comment, it also sounds like you aren't willing to pay for the type of reliability promises that you are selling, so it seems odd to complain about a free service not doing so.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#33

Post by laumars »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
laumars wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

Because your initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively without them necessarily being the party that deserves your scorn.

> Because your initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively

I said they have 2 issues arise a year (which, by the way, was already counter argued before you joined the thread). I did also compliment 2 other aspects of their business. So to say my "initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively" and "your scorn" is needlessly sensationalising things.

We are all professionals so can we please have a grounded discussion?

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#34

Post by JimDabell »

ergo14 wrote: post #29
chrisBob wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think he was responding to:

> Since I prefer Mercurial over git I don't have any other option than to run my own instance.

You do have another option – you can use Mercurial with Bitbucket. Sure, it's not self-hosted, but you were complaining that you were forced to self-host because you prefer Mercurial, right?

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#35

Post by Xylakant »

laumars wrote: post #26
Xylakant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 seri…

> 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.

Which is all fine and dandy - then use a service that provides the required SLA and pay the price (github business or enterprise, have someone host gitlab for you with the required SLA, ...) or store your data redundantly in gitlab and github at the same time (git can do that) and factor the overhead into the bill. I'm not saying a good uptime is impossible - it's just something that will cost (a lot of) money. Bill accordingly.

All the while keep in mind that the SLA of the source code hosting should not have any impact on the uptime of the service itself. Clients - especially larger ones - as a matter of fact do understand that the SLA on issue tracking, code hosting etc. can differ from the SLA on the app.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#36

Post by MildlySerious »

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…

I think this is, at least in part, a perceived thing. GitLab's technical blog posts regularly hit the HN frontpage, while GitHub's issues just seemingly get swiped under the rug, unless it's major, or it's positive news of them introducing new features.

Just earlier I got messages that 'info for the latest commits couldn't be loaded' on GH, whatever that means, but I don't see a blog post as to why on HN.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#37

Post by laumars »

pbecotte wrote: post #32
laumars wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seri…

If you are selling your clients those types of guarantees, then you aren't going to be able to rely on a public service with less reliability than your guarantee. Which probably means you are out of luck... I can't imagine it is worth it financially for github or gitlab to pay for too many 9s. Of course, based on your comment, it also sounds like you aren't willing to pay for the type of reliability promises that you…

As stated elsewhere, we are willing and do pay for those services. In fact we moved from self hosting Git (which was free) to a paid hosted solution. So we do currently pay for git hosting and is something I'm happy to continue to do (albeit I have no allegiances with any specific hosting providers).

With regards to your first point. Yes you're right about how it's probably not in Gitlabs interest to pay for too many 9s. Maybe Gitlab initially appeared to have worse availability than their competitors because they're more open with their literature so I read more about Gitlab's problems than their competitors. But reading a bit more on Gitlab I found a document about provisioning Gitlab in HA environments, which addresses some of the points I'd been discussing.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#38

Post by jacquesm »

laumars wrote: post #33
jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively without them necessarily being the party that deserves your scorn.

> Because your initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively I said they have 2 issues arise a year (which, by the way, was already counter argued before you joined the thread). I did also compliment 2 other aspects of their business. So to say my "initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively" and "your scorn" is needlessly sensationalising things. We are all professionals so can we please have a grounded discussion…

> which, by the way, was already counter argued before you joined the thread

I tend to open a bunch of tabs and go through them one-by-one so apologies for the duplicates.

> I did also compliment 2 other aspects of their business.

The proper description of that is 'damning with faint praise', of which your comment is an excellent example.

> So to say my "initial comment pans gitlab quite extensively" and "your scorn" is needlessly sensationalising things.

No, I think it is a quite accurate description of your comment. Whether you agree with that or not is up to you, but just take the fact that I read it as such as a datapoint.

> We are all professionals so can we please have a grounded discussion?

That's an assumption that I won't comment on.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#39

Post by laumars »

MildlySerious wrote: post #36
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…

I think this is, at least in part, a perceived thing. GitLab's technical blog posts regularly hit the HN frontpage, while GitHub's issues just seemingly get swiped under the rug, unless it's major, or it's positive news of them introducing new features. Just earlier I got messages that 'info for the latest commits couldn't be loaded' on GH, whatever that means, but I don't see a blog post as to why on HN.

I think you're right. I've been doing more reading on Gitlab and their competitors and it seems I'd forgotten about a few incidents with Github and Bitbucket.

I guess it just goes to show that openness is a double edged sword. Though I'm still thankful that businesses like Gitlab do adopt such policies.

Re: Repos are disappearing from Gitlab

#40

Post by laumars »

Xylakant wrote: post #35
laumars wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seri…

> 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. Which is all fine and dandy - then use a service that provides the required SLA and pay the price (github business or enterprise, have someone host gitlab for you with the required SLA, ...) or store your data redundantly in…

We do pay for git hosting (why does everyone assume that I expect this to be free?)

The issue isn't so much with code hosting but more with code pipelining. We can live without being able to do `git push` for 24 hours(see footnote), but having our code pipeline down during a tight release cycle could be detrimental.

This obviously isn't Gitlab's problem, just a side effect of the current devops automation culture. But something I need to plan for - or at least have considered and weighed up the cost vs impact to business.

Footnote: I'm not implying Gitlab has outages lasting this long. I'm just plucking a figure out of thin air for the sake of a wider discussion regarding HA.

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