Gitlab from YC to IPO • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#181

Post by kerblang » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #40

vultour wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

> Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins. I've heard Jenkins is a nightmare to administer (not sure about the new versions). Seems like an opportunity: the power of Jenkins with modern sensibility.

Just to contradict the complaining about groovy scripts: I reduced something like 100 jobs to 2 using groovy in jenkins, and it has been a godsend. I'm not having any problems with it.

Mind you, the Groovy stuff was implemented as an afterthought, and if you aren't handy with Groovy (I am) it can be challenging to learn. But compared to the horrible GUI-driven alternative, it was a no-brainer in the end.

Really, the more you're doing CI, the more you want scripts - doesn't have to be Groovy. I'd honestly be perfectly fine just doing things with a bash shell on a vanilla linux install. I only use Jenkins because my team insists on it, for what? So we can put a web UI in front of CI. I'd even tend to agree that with supply-chain attacks being what they are, and jenkins being a never-ending fountain of security patches, putting a web UI in front of CI isn't worth it.

But at least the groovy part makes life bearable.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#182

Post by __turbobrew__ » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

devoutsalsa wrote: post #70

10000truths wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it can be easily self hosted, which is great for data residency compliance, or specialized security needs.

Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that. Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.

The gitlab omnibus installation has built in support for backups. Literally just run a single command to create a backup on a network share.

Not having backups for gitlab on prem is just lazy system administration.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#183

Post by robinhood » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #101

pankajdoharey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

Github is a website while Gitlab is software.

Github is actually a web application, like Gitlab.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#184

Post by paxys » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #5

I haven't used gitlab much, but I was shocked to hear GitHub's CTO (at the time of the interview, he has moved on since) state that GitHub didn't consider them a competitor. "I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor." https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud... Anyone have thoughts on that? Or pointe…

They are similar products but target different market segments. Github wants public open-source projects, Gitlab wants large enterprises.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#185

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

robinhood wrote: post #183

dragontamer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github is a website while Gitlab is software.

Github is actually a web application, like Gitlab.

Can you download Github and host a private Github instance? No? Then its web-only. Like Google Docs is web-only, while MS Word is offline.

Gitlab is hostable software. You can buy and host Gitlab on your own servers, in private. That makes it a fundamentally different market than Github.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#186

Post by robinhood » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #105

pankajdoharey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

GitHub is Microsoft now. Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a good enough use case.

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage.

Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of needing to generate as much revenue as possible to satisfy their investors. Github is not in this position anymore.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#187

Post by rossmohax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

swozey wrote: post #170

vultour wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

Github makes you do a ton of goofy side work to get simple things you'll expect in Gitlab/etc to work. Want to check out multiple repos? You'll need someone with org admin to create a service account and to manually pull each repo in a CI step with that service accounts token. This means tons of people are using their own PATs to get around "who is the github org admin?" sort of stuff. I could go on and on, Github Ac…

No idea why you've been downvoted. Gitlab CI is lightyears ahead of Github Actions, it's a fact.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#188

Post by rossmohax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

secondaryacct wrote: post #96

vultour wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

And jenkins is centuries behind Teamcity. My company extracted us from github+teamcity paradise to force fit us to gitlab, it's not going well. Try both and for real, build a real project pipeline and see if that works for your dev before moving to either.

I never worked with Teamcity, but created a fairly complicated Gitlab CI pipelines. What do you miss in Gitlab CI?

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#189

Post by rossmohax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #129

Gitlab is definitely very neat. But I always worry when these sorts of companies go to IPO. What is their financial situation like? Are they currently able to become profitable without drastically changing the deal with users?

They had $192M losses in 2021 and $152M revenue. So no, not even remotely profitable, but it is common: Atlassian, Jira, Datadog, PagerDuty, Snowflake, CloudFlare, Fastly all IPOed and succeeded on the market without being profitable even once.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#190

Post by rossmohax » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

adduc wrote: post #178

exhaze wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the GitLab S-1? They have great retention with larger companies. Can you substantiate any of your claims? (FYI I have no horse in this race, I evaluated GH vs GL recently and decided to stay on GH for now)

From their S-1: > We do not have an adequate history with our subscription or pricing models to accurately predict the long-term rate of customer subscription renewals or adoption, or the impact these renewals and adoption will have on our revenues or operating results. For context, GitLab recently axed their lowest priced plan and grandfathered in existing users at cheaper rates for the next year. Their retention ra…

CI is moving in Kubernetes everywhere I know. Builtin kubernetes pod autoscaler can add capacity based on job queue length metric, so no need for docker machine anymore.