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GitLab is now running on GCP

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Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#51

Post by conradk »

koolba wrote: post #8
moltar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the cost of Heroku on free, or nearly free tier, isn’t comparable to GKE. When I tried to launch a demo cluster it was basically launching numerous VMs just to support itself. I don’t know the monthly total, since I abandoned that idea pretty quick. But I imagine it’d be over $50/mo to run a tiny web app. My point is that every offering has its place. Heroku is great for getting going. Recently I’ve been experime…

You can have it both ways by leveraging the free / hobby tier of Heroku with bringing your own data store. Nothing binds you to their resource providers. Just add an environment variable for your own database or Redis provider.

Then you lose some security though, because I think Heroku uses large IPs ranges [1]. There seems to be no way to allow database access from a private IP address, other than using expensive proxying addons. That means you probably have to open up your database to 0.0.0.0/0, which is not good at all.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15512360/get-a-finite-li...

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#52

Post by solatic »

smnrchrds wrote: post #12

I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.

Devil's advocate: IANAL but my understanding is that the kind of safe harbors that exist in other areas of IP law, e.g. that network providers are not responsible for copyright violations, either do not apply to export controls or have not been subject to sufficient legal review to establish a precedent that would protect Google from export control liability from software that is hosted by customers on their infrastructure where the customer has not undertaken the necessary measures to implement the export controls required by law.

If you think the law is unjust, then target the law, don't target the companies which err on the side of legal caution. After all, certainly we'd prefer for companies to err on the side of regulators in many other cases...

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#53

Post by zzzcpan »

solatic wrote: post #52
smnrchrds wrote: post #12

I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.

Devil's advocate: IANAL but my understanding is that the kind of safe harbors that exist in other areas of IP law, e.g. that network providers are not responsible for copyright violations, either do not apply to export controls or have not been subject to sufficient legal review to establish a precedent that would protect Google from export control liability from software that is hosted by customers on their infrastr…

There are billions in fines of evidence that they don't care about the law and are willing to ignore it as long it benefits them. They are "legally cautious" purely strategically.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#54

Post by koolba »

conradk wrote: post #51
koolba wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have it both ways by leveraging the free / hobby tier of Heroku with bringing your own data store. Nothing binds you to their resource providers. Just add an environment variable for your own database or Redis provider.

Then you lose some security though, because I think Heroku uses large IPs ranges [1]. There seems to be no way to allow database access from a private IP address, other than using expensive proxying addons. That means you probably have to open up your database to 0.0.0.0/0, which is not good at all. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15512360/get-a-finite-li...

Nothing stops someone from spinning up a Heroku bash terminal and trying to access your internal DB either so it’s not markedly worse than pure Heroku.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#55

Post by [deleted] »

smnrchrds wrote: post #12

I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.

[deleted]

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#56

Post by edoceo »

conradk wrote: post #51
koolba wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have it both ways by leveraging the free / hobby tier of Heroku with bringing your own data store. Nothing binds you to their resource providers. Just add an environment variable for your own database or Redis provider.

Then you lose some security though, because I think Heroku uses large IPs ranges [1]. There seems to be no way to allow database access from a private IP address, other than using expensive proxying addons. That means you probably have to open up your database to 0.0.0.0/0, which is not good at all. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15512360/get-a-finite-li...

You can get better firewall control than just open/shut

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#57

Post by cutety »

mattlondon wrote: post #39

Anyone noticed any performance changes? Anyone from Gitlab have any data to share? I had a look at https://monitor.gitlab.net/d/000000003/fleet-overview?refres... but don't know what I am looking at :-) General browsing around feels snappier than it did before. I just tried importing some new repos from Github and it was fast (like 2 or 3 seconds for tiny repos, under 10s for larger ones). During the aftermath of the…

I’d also be interested in some actual performance metrics/benchmarks. I’m a big fan of gitlab, love gitlab CI, and I Iike (most of) the UI more than github’s, but my one biggest gripe with it it is how sluggish browsing it at times could be, groaning if I accidentally clicked the wrong file because now I have to wait/stop that and go back and then wait for the one I actually wanted. It’s certainly improved over the last year to the point where I only occasionally had to sigh as I navigated through a repo, but it’s been creeping towards GitHub level performance at least.

However, I did take a few minutes just now while I’m farting around on my phone on the toilet to go and browse through random repos, opening random files, looking through issues/merge requests, etc, and it definitely seem noticeably snappier, opening large files from my phone seemed to be as quick as github, no sitting twiddling my thumbs waiting for a 200+ line file to load like I had previously experienced many times. Hopefully someone can confirm this with some actual numbers, but first impressions are pleasant.

If the performance improvements are actually significant, and hold up overtime, this will certainly help gitlab’s ever growing popularity as the one complaint I always see get brought up in gitlab discussions is it’s performance (aside from a few that don’t like the UI — but that’s a bit more towards personal preference rather than objective metrics).

It’ll likely take some classic 80s-90s Microsoft “business strategy”, or more recently what they did with Skype, for gitlab to ever have a chance at overtaking github. But, as a gitlab user, and fan of competition/not having essentially a single (closed source) entity being the “hub” of all open source code.

All this said, while I’m more than happy to see major performance improvements to gitlab.com, what would make me even happier is to see some performance improvements for self hosted instances. But, I realize that takes quite a bit more work to improve since it likely involves quite a bit of code/app level optimizations, rather than just throwing more computing power at it. Our instance at work is usable, but good lord can opening large files/directories be annoying, and since unfortunately gitlab isn’t really considered a hyper critical system at my workplace, deploying it to largely scaled & optimized GCP/AWS/Azure infra isn’t likely going to be an option anytime soon. So, gitlab just please don’t forget about us lowly folks that have it deployed to a small cluster/single server who can’t just throw more and more resources at it.

Also, if there any gitlab folks reading my rant, and you want to grant a wish of mine/make my work life significantly more enjoyable, if you guys could get back to the people that have been in contact with you about getting a education gitlab ultimate license (I work at a large university)[1], I’d likely forget about the performance issues entirely. They said they reached out to you guys, however they said they were told the education license program wasn’t ready to be completely rolled out or something?

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/education/

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#58

Post by Adverblessly »

smnrchrds wrote: post #19
cobookman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't every US based company be under the same laws in regards to sanctions?

The legal requirements are lower. They are not allowed to sell hosting to persons from sanctioned countries for example, and all companies follow that rule. But interpreting the law to mean you cannot show hosted sites to visitors from those countries (like Google) or that you cannot allow downloads of free software from your website (like Oracle JRE) is an over-reaction only some companies do. The real reason is tha…

> The real reason is that since they cannot extract money from these countries because of the sanctions, they don't care about their existence, or how much trouble people from those countries would face due to their decisions.

That doesn't make sense to me, letting people from those countries access resources on GCP does make Google money, since presumably Google will be paid by the website owner (which doesn't live in any of these countries) for the extra bandwidth/resources used by their website.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#59

Post by conradk »

edoceo wrote: post #56
conradk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you lose some security though, because I think Heroku uses large IPs ranges [1]. There seems to be no way to allow database access from a private IP address, other than using expensive proxying addons. That means you probably have to open up your database to 0.0.0.0/0, which is not good at all. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15512360/get-a-finite-li...

You can get better firewall control than just open/shut

Would you mind sharing what you have in mind please? I'm genuinely interested in how that would work.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#60

Post by jacques_chester »

mattlondon wrote: post #39

Anyone noticed any performance changes? Anyone from Gitlab have any data to share? I had a look at https://monitor.gitlab.net/d/000000003/fleet-overview?refres... but don't know what I am looking at :-) General browsing around feels snappier than it did before. I just tried importing some new repos from Github and it was fast (like 2 or 3 seconds for tiny repos, under 10s for larger ones). During the aftermath of the…

A lot of the performance gains you get from GCP come from taking shortcuts over private fibre.

Traffic inbound to a GCP-hosted system first goes to a local point-of-presence, then makes relatively few hops to reach its destination via Google's private fibre network.

You can get a discount if you let packets make their own way to the destination over the public internet, but in practice that will make sense for cost-sensitive bulk operations, rather than interactive usage.

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