Live data from Hacker News

GitLab Serverless

about.gitlab.com

71–80 of 126 posts

Re: GitLab Serverless

#71
post #47

Can someone explain me what that hype about serverless is? As I understand it, serverless is just good old webhosting, but in the cloud. With webhosting I mean providers offering a LAMP-environment and customer just upload their code and don't manage anything else. Is this correct? Then how is serverless different to this?

To me, it's about the abstraction layer that you interact with when bringing up your stack. That abstraction layer has gradually moved higher over time as providers try and deliver more for their customers: 1) Hardware) 'I want to run Linux + Stack + App'. You get an empty rack, a network port and a power socket. You have to buy iron, install and maintain OS/platform, runtime environment and your service. Scaling req…

I would say something like step 3 is mainly needed to get to step 4. While it doesn't have to be containers most of the implementations, as I understand them, use containers as the underlying mechanism to offer up serverless / FaaS. So you have container runtimes, microVMs (Amazon Firecracker) and... What other components are out there?

Re: GitLab Serverless

#72

> to zero and backup I assume this should be "back up." Otherwise I'm missing what this has to do with backups.

Good catch Michael, that's right. We meant the "back up" and we are fixing this typo https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/....

Thank you for pointing this out and sorry for the confusion.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#73
post #8

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?

Hey, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Sorry for the confusion with the words. We actually meant "back up" which has a bit different context. Fixing that in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

Re: GitLab Serverless

#74
post #5
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.

Thanks for the feedback.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#76
post #19
post #16

I didn't read the article but something tells me that "serverless" involves a server of some kind ...

From tfa: "...serverless computing is an execution model in which the cloud provider acts as the server, dynamically managing the allocation of machine resources." The name "serverless" is so unfortunate... On-demand would have been better.

Hehe, I agree. Sadly, IMO the term has taken over and so we’re stuck with it because of the quick recognition people have to serverless ...

Re: GitLab Serverless

#77
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hi, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Could you please reference what issues you are experiencing? We'd love to follow up on it.

Also, if you want to write the details, it would be great to open an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues. Thanks in advance.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#78

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 does…

To clarify, we are not getting into the cloud play at all. We support multi-cloud deployments of any kind now including serverless. So you can use the GitLab UI to plan, build, deploy, manage serverless apps/functions with the rest of your code. Knative helps us deploy to any cloud.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#79
I would appreciate it if they first focused on getting their Kubernetes integration working with anything other than Google cloud. Or maybe add support for RBAC, or a variety of other things that make some of these amazing features like auto devops workable for the common man without having to spend weeks setting it up.

If I try to install gitlab on Kubernetes I have no less than 4 ways to do it, and none of them work perfectly.

Re: GitLab Serverless

#80
post #18

Can someone explain me what that hype about serverless is? As I understand it, serverless is just good old webhosting, but in the cloud. With webhosting I mean providers offering a LAMP-environment and customer just upload their code and don't manage anything else. Is this correct? Then how is serverless different to this?

People abuse the term serverless, yes to mean "cloud" or "somebody else server" and "just write the function you want we will find a server to run it on and report to you the result". The term I like to associate with serverless is all peer-to-peer, not client-server architecture, for example any datwebsite, on datproject, and any zsite on zeronet. There you dont have a server, really, a zite is a peer in a torrent s…

Serverless means "I don't have to maintain or even know anything about a server", not "there is no server".
Post reply on HN