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Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

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Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#121
post #17
post #3

Question to current Gitlab users: Why do you use Gitlab instead of Github? What are the killer features that make it worth switching to?

I want to say it's the freedom to self-host, but really it's the CI. Throwing a .gitlab-ci.yml file into my repo is by far the easiest way to get CI/CD incorporated into a product. The configuration of test runners (or lack thereof) is both a breeze and extremely powerful. I'm not even talking about the auto-devops thing that I haven't tried; writing your own gitlab-ci file worked in frictionless ways that CircleCI,…

How is CircleCI not easy to use? It's honestly the easiest and most feature complete CI system I've ever used.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#122

Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source projects? I have no horse in the race (indeed, I'd love for there to be more variety in this space) but one of my jobs is to link to open source repos and I've just checked.. and the last one I linked to was in December 2018. In the niches I cover, almost no-one seems to actually using GitLab for their open source repos. Lest you think it's just…

There are some high-profile FOSS projects using GitLab, but they're not as visible as they would be on GitHub because they host their own instances:

- https://gitlab.gnome.org/

- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/

- https://salsa.debian.org/ (AFAIK this is an ongoing migration)

Others are considering a migration:

- KDE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/24900

- GNU Emacs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/28152

Maybe someday we'll have federation to work around this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/30672 :-)

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#123
post #8
post #6

I am curious how the Gitlab is so valuable. I've never used the service, but HN posts keep me informed superficially. Could someone explain the valuation?

Microsoft bought Github for $7.5B so it gives them a great comparable.

Yeah, but if Github goes down the developer world basically comes to a standstill, while if Gitlab goes down, most developers will only read about this on hacker news.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#124
post #44

We’ve been using Gitlab for 4 years now. What got us initially was the free private repos before github had that. We are now a paying customer. Their integrated CICD is amazing. It works perfectly for all our needs and integrates really easily with AWS and GCP. Also their customer service is really damn good. If I ever have an issue, it’s dealt with so fast and with so much detail. Honestly one of the best customer s…

GitLab employee here. Thanks so much for the kind words - I shared it on our internal Slack as a #thanks [1] to the whole team (and specifically our support engineering group who I agree are AMAZING). [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#say-thanks

A thank you from me as well. I self-host gitlab and all our projects are on there.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#125
post #37

Kudos to the team. While my current workspace is tied to GitHub, I will most certainly switch to Gitlab given the option to. Why? Only one reason: GitHub support is fucking horrible. It’s insanely bad, even for paying enterprise customers. Open a support ticket, you will get some superficial pointers to documentation, and then be completely ignored. Their Product team is the absolute worst too. There are so many thin…

I can totally relate to that. In flood of notifications I missed information about expiring CC. Instead of somehow soft-locking the account they just downgraded it and all my integrations, hooks and god knows what just blowed. I managed to fix the CC in 5 minutes, but many months after I am still recovering from that disaster. Support replied that they did send warning so I should just FO.

IMO at that point since you have to rebuild everything anyway, just rebuild it with a different vendor. No reason to stay with a company that treats you like that.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search friendliness. Quite a few open-source projects rely heavily on being findable, and often use their Github README as a sort of "marketing site" for developers. Finding projects organically on Gitlab is a nightmare.

When was the last time you found a project organically on GitHub?

Well, organically is a vague term. My usage of it was: go to GitLab/Hub and type into global site search box to find a project.

This seemingly simple action does not work on Gitlab.

To answer your question, I do the above often on Github. Probably found projects that way as recently as last week.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#128
I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd. The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never had any issues with it.

My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment variables from ci logs is not sufficient. It won't match + scrub aws secret keys in the logs, which seems like a pretty glaring problem in a cicd setup.

> masked so they are hidden in job logs, though they must match certain regexp requirements to do so

We've been able to work around it, but it did make that particular automation more difficult.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search friendliness. Quite a few open-source projects rely heavily on being findable, and often use their Github README as a sort of "marketing site" for developers. Finding projects organically on Gitlab is a nightmare.

Search in general in Gitlab is painful. Searches seem to require 3 or more characters, but if you put two you just don't see any results. No warning saying add more. Pretty intuitive. The file name search is pretty rapid though.

We have an ongoing project to enable Elasticsearch on gitlab.com, which will greatly improve this: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/153

There's also a dedicated Search team being built at the moment to focus just on this.

Re: Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO

#130

I am a huge fan of gitlab. We are in the process of moving our github org over. We love!! the gitlab ci tools. We use them extensively for mobile cicd. The gitlab ci runner is super easy to get running and coordinates well with a host and vm setup. We run it on a mac min sitting on my desk and have never had any issues with it. My only nitpick is the regex matching they do to mask protected environment variables from…

Hey, CI/CD PM here. I'd love to learn more about how you're using GitLab for mobile, if you're up for it ping me at @jlenny on gitlab.com. It's an area of focus for us, and it's always great to get to know another person who is using that use case.
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