GitLab Serverless

#1

Post by sriram_iyengar » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

GitLab Serverless
about.gitlab.com

Re: GitLab Serverless

#2

Post by mr_toad » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 5:37 AM UTC

Article does a very good job of burying the lede.

tl;dr; GitLab have have a FaaS offering in alpha.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#3

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

This seems to be the first product to run actual workloads on instead of out-of-band management?

I'm a bit lost when it comes to GitLab because they are trying to do so much, so I'm confused if this is a change in strategy or natural next step for them.

Edit: Clarifying question.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#4

Post by jondubois » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 7:48 AM UTC

Serverless functions are a terrible idea. Way too restrictive and proprietary. Kubernetes is the future. Amazon throwing money behind the Serverless trend is only delaying the inevitable universal success of a standardized, open source container orchestration platform.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#5

Post by ndnxhs » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 7:53 AM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #3

This seems to be the first product to run actual workloads on instead of out-of-band management? I'm a bit lost when it comes to GitLab because they are trying to do so much, so I'm confused if this is a change in strategy or natural next step for them. Edit: Clarifying question.

I don't think they are trying to do more than they can handle. Every feature I have used on gitlab has worked amazing so it doesn't seem like they are spread thin.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#6

Post by est » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 8:05 AM UTC

ndnxhs wrote: post #5

gtirloni wrote: post #3

This seems to be the first product to run actual workloads on instead of out-of-band management? I'm a bit lost when it comes to GitLab because they are trying to do so much, so I'm confused if this is a change in strategy or natural next step for them. Edit: Clarifying question.

I don't think they are trying to do more than they can handle. Every feature I have used on gitlab has worked amazing so it doesn't seem like they are spread thin.

everything works great on gitlab, until the moment you had to migrate.

Landmine experience in issue lists

Re: GitLab Serverless

#7

Post by jively » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 8:06 AM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #4

Serverless functions are a terrible idea. Way too restrictive and proprietary. Kubernetes is the future. Amazon throwing money behind the Serverless trend is only delaying the inevitable universal success of a standardized, open source container orchestration platform.

It’s based on Knative I think, so this is an open source, kubernetes-based alternative tied into GitLab.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#8

Post by jerluc » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 8:07 AM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #4

Serverless functions are a terrible idea. Way too restrictive and proprietary. Kubernetes is the future. Amazon throwing money behind the Serverless trend is only delaying the inevitable universal success of a standardized, open source container orchestration platform.

I don't understand, half of this announcement refers to the fact that this new feature is built upon Knative:

> It leverages Knative, which enables autoscaling down to zero and backup to run serverless workloads on Kubernetes.

So what are you referring to?

Re: GitLab Serverless

#9

Post by rolandboon » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 8:10 AM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #4

Serverless functions are a terrible idea. Way too restrictive and proprietary. Kubernetes is the future. Amazon throwing money behind the Serverless trend is only delaying the inevitable universal success of a standardized, open source container orchestration platform.

Your argument against serverless functions holds for AWS Lambda, but this Gitlab feature is based on Knative. That's an open source serverless platform based on Kubernetes.

I think all money Amazon is throwing at serverless is to build a foundation to ultimately transform all their "managed" services into a serverless form. They already released serverless RDS (https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/).

Re: GitLab Serverless

#10

Post by hardwaresofton » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 8:16 AM UTC

I'm a huge Gitlab fan but this seems a little parallel to their core service if not orthogonal... I've been pretty pleased with the feature progress of Gitlab overall though, for example support for merge request-only CI steps just landed[0]

I see this as a play to start leveraging all the machines they have hanging around for running jobs and gitlab instances, and I'm not against it as long as the Gitlab itself doesn't suffer. Are they planning to pivot to becoming a cloud provider like digital ocean? It feels like if they can manage orchestrating serverless functions they can manage orchestrating containers or VMs...

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gitlab/comments/a54mc3/support_for_...