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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

#221
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?

Our devops team loves Gitlab pipelines and pushed the decision through. If you're looking for a "killer feature" on Gitlab, pipelines is probably it.

As a developer I don't think there's a huge difference, especially since we don't use the issue tracking or wiki stuff (we're all in Jira/Confluence). My main complaint about Gitlab is that there are a lot of places where the UI is rough around the edges (lots of pages lack or have very minimal search/sort options) or has outright bad UX, as well as lacking some features that feel pretty basic to me.

My main complaints about Gitlab at the moment:

* Lack of search/sort, as mentioned above

* We created teams in Gitlab to mirror our scrum teams... when you look at the team list in Gitlab, it shows everyone who has access to the team, which is our whole damned Gitlab account. The only way to find the actual team members is to scroll down the list looking for users with a delete icon by their name (which removes them from the team).

* If you want to set a required number of approvals on merge requests, you also have to set the list of reviewers. I wanted to set two required approvers but let the devs assign who (normally their team)... no can do.

* Poor support for making merge requests build the result the merge (instead of just the branch). We've tried setting it up a couple of times, but usually end up with MR's hung because Gitlab doesn't firing the right builds and end up having to turn it off.

* If you have the server squash commits when closing a MR there's no way to set the commit message in advance; you have to type in the message just before you click the merge button. This wouldn't be an issue if it defaulted to using the MR description as the commit message, but it doesn't do that either...

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer uses gitlab for most internal projects because of ITAR and other legal restrictions (aerospace). No external hosted services allowed, except obviously for released open source code.

Wait, the rule says everything must be locally hosted, except if it's open source - then cloud hosted saas is fine? Can you explain the rationale?

If it's open source then necessarily it's been approved by export control. Anything open-sourced obviously can't contain ballistic information which would violate ITAR. But by default, all internal software and documents/documentation related to spacecraft/aircraft are assumed to be sensitive until they've gone through the export control process.

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

#223
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience CircleCI is an excellent alternative.

In my experience CircleCI feels like an excellent alternative for the first few weeks/month, until you realise all the missing features, unreliability, and issues, at which point you contact support and find their support is very poor and mostly just ask you to go and "vote" for which bugfixes you want to see on their community site, where product ideas go to die.

Agree that support is hard, especially when dealing with a very technical product, with very technical users. As far as fixes/enhancements go: every company has to prioritize somewhere. That means not everything gets done. Limited time, limited resources.

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

#224
post #143
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…

That's interesting, my experience with GH support is the polar opposite – they've been stellar. Particularly their enterprise support went above and beyond when we had issues and never did I feel I got either a canned response or even had to wait particularly long to receive an answer. At one point we had an issue with a flaky load balancer sometimes dropping connections, but the folks maintaining the load balancer w…

I sent them a msg about 2FA recently and got a real reply that didnt sidestep the question/problem.

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

#225
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…

We are Gitlab customers since 2017 and I can tell you that your expectations for what support can do for you are very unrealistic. Per their own policy all they do is finding relevant tickets and send you there, from there on you are not their problem anymore. You as customers is also not a developer/product manager problem either, they do their planning and priotization using their own ideas and unless ticket is in…

Hi @rossmohax - Support Manager for GitLab here.

> Per their own policy all they do is finding relevant tickets and send you there, from there on you are not their problem anymore.

I believe you're referring to: https://about.gitlab.com/support/#we-dont-keep-tickets-open-...

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, although I can certainly understand your reading. If your support ticket does end up as revealing a fault in the product or a feature request, we will close out the ticket and prefer further communication on the resulting issue. This is in keeping with our Transparency value. We want to make sure that others who are affected can also chime in, and that the resulting issue is the single source of truth.

For issues with configuration, up-time or other support-related things that aren't feature requests or bugs, we would be handling those directly.

On those cases that do result in bug reports or feature requests, it's certainly true that sometimes they aren't prioritized, don't get attention, or have milestones slip.

Again though, that happens transparently where you can interact directly with the PMs in question.

Ultimately, it is a _different_ support experience, but we believe that it's better to have our community as close to our development process as possible.

We do consider this an ongoing discussion, and have a long running issue where a number of customers have provided some feedback: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/issu...

Please do feel free to join the discussion.

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

#226

At my last job Gitlab was in the stack and I had never used it before so I was expecting it to be a real pain. It was actually a perfectly pleasant experience. I don't think it'll make me leave Github but I put them at the same level now. Merge Requests never felt right saying over Pull Requests, even though it's more descriptive of what's actually happening.

I'm being pedantic here, but the reason I prefer pull is because it feels more general than a "merge," which to me precludes a fetch/rebase. I guess you could consider it a merge -ff-only, but in a mergeless-master workflow, "merge request" felt awkward.

That makes a lot of sense

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

#227
post #71

While my org uses perforce extensively; we also have a gitlab premium license (with far too many seats than we have users due to a fuck-up deploying mattermost org wide then promptly disbanding the effort after the damage was done) which we use enjoyably. Despite the fact the people who host our gitlab internal do not update it often or support it well I do think it’s a great product at the enterprise level. So much…

what happened with the MM deploy ooi?

Microsoft came and gave us teams “for free”. And since we’d tied mattermost to gitlab, every mattermost user (non-developer) was (is) costing us money. :/

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

#228
post #63
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…

> Their integrated CICD is amazing. My company switched to BitBucket in order to pinch pennies, and now I weep when I have to get Jenkins and BitBucket to play nice with each other or to do something. GitLab CI just works , is easily horizontally scalable without paying exorbitant prices for more "agents", etc... I miss GitLab...

My company is currently considering switching away from GitLab CI/CD as well as we've found no way to increase the number of available minutes (2000 on our tier I believe, doesn't last very long) without upgrading many tiers before we can even scale it at all. Can I ask what plan you're on? I'm assuming since your company wants to pinch pennies you're also fairly small?

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

#229
post #143
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…

That's interesting, my experience with GH support is the polar opposite – they've been stellar. Particularly their enterprise support went above and beyond when we had issues and never did I feel I got either a canned response or even had to wait particularly long to receive an answer. At one point we had an issue with a flaky load balancer sometimes dropping connections, but the folks maintaining the load balancer w…

I've only been a free user on GitHub, but I've also been impressed with their support. I once had a question about how they handle a very particular situation with forking workflows and private groups.

The rep was very knowledgable and took the time to explain exactly what would happen.

This was years ago, but I appreciated the support at the time, and as a Support Manager at GitLab would still point to it as an example of a quality response.

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

#230
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that signing up for an account at gitlab.com is a barrier. Anyone willing and capable to make contributions won't be stymied by that step. There's even a "Sign in with GitHub" button..!

Gitlab doesn't have even basic notification centre, people been asking it for years. Github API integration is stellar, API token permissions can be configured granularly, Github apps marketplace is awesome way to start using third party services. First class integration experience is opposite from Gitlab goals, they try to be everything and capture every single usecase and it shows .

Hi, we do believe in the single application offering the best long term user experience and outcomes, but do understand that all of our features may not work for everyone. This is happens for a variety of reasons (completeness, migrations, specific project requirements, etc.)

Because of this, we do offer our API and the ability for our community to contribute integrations directly to the codebase. We have a pretty rich set today, you can see at: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/integrations/project...

We're also working to further improve our integration options, with a dedicated team: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ecosystem/. This team will be responsible for our broader API, an upcoming SDK, as well as continuing to improve our existing integrations like JIRA and Jenkins. This team is just getting under way, but I wanted note our investments here.

> Github API integration is stellar, API token permissions can be configured granularly, Github apps marketplace is awesome way to start using third party services.

PAT granularity has indeed been a pain point, and we should be solving this soon by offering the ability to restrict them by groups/projects: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/182

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