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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

#341

Post by mikekchar »

rossmohax wrote: post #338
gabeweaver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. GitLab PM here. I'm really sorry that this is your experience. Can you point me to this policy? I would like to propose a change to it given that's not reflective of how most teams do planning and prioritization. We care very much about support issues, regularly prioritize a large portion of each release to addressing them, and can not do it effectively without ongoing involvement and feedback from the wider comm…

It is in your own Statement of Support: > Any assistance with modifications to GitLab, including new functionality, bug-fixes, issues with alpha features or other code changes should go through the GitLab issue tracker, triage, and release cycle. And it matches our experience as customer. We are power users and almost every single support issue we opened is a bugreport or a feature request. Support team can bring val…

If you do end up moving to another provider, I'd be interested to see if you get a better experience. Once of the things that puzzles me, especially for an open core solution, is that companies really don't want to do custom development. Or possibly they don't want to have the difficult discussion about cost.

I'm always harping on about this, but I don't really see open source companies trying to build value the way Cygnus did. Instead of saying, "Pay us $x per seat and you get whatever we give you", say "Have as many seats as you want and pay us $x to make it do what you want". Cygnus actually did both with GCC and were quite successful at it.

It's not just Gitlabs either. I can't think of a software provider with an open core model that primarily sells software development services (Hmmm... Possibly Code Weavers now that I think about it). I remember asking this to Gitlabs ages ago and they said that they tried this model before they took VC money but that they just couldn't get it to work. It still baffles me as to why that's the case.

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

#342

Post by mcintyre1994 »

eblanshey wrote: post #304
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, we do this on GitLab.com - it’s one of the most well thought through systems I’ve worked with tbh. We use autoscaling EC2 spot instances for almost everything, incredibly cost efficient and unlimited.

Just curious how this works out for you? When I tried this, even when the spot bid was way above current price, it would often be stuck in a pending state since spot instances don't get created immediately. Do you get spot instances to be created immediately on demand somehow?

Yep we see spot instances immediately created - there's no noticeable delay (compared to build times) against having permanent EC2 instances running. For our runners we want to use spot instances, the important part of the gitlab-runner register command are:

  --executor docker+machine \
  --machine-machine-driver amazonec2 \
  --machine-machine-options "amazonec2-request-spot-instance=true \
  --machine-machine-options "amazonec2-spot-price="
That last one means our bid defaults to the current on-demand price, which seems to get fulfilled immediately. FWIW we're using m4.large instances in eu-west-1a and according to the AWS UI the spot price has been perfectly consistent (at about 1/3 of on-demand) for at least the last 3 months so maybe that consistency is why it works so well for us.

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

#343

Post by Existenceblinks »

rasz wrote: post #253
petercooper wrote: post #82

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…

I dont understand their UI at all. Whenever some project is hosted on gitlab I just stare at the page for a while and give up.

I work on git hosts integration, we aim to support Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab. I don't understand Gitlab api just like I don't understand their UI. It's confusing. For example while the others call Repo as Repo, Gitlab call Repo as Project, and call Tree as Repo.

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

#344

Post by danpalmer »

dvlsg wrote: post #182
danpalmer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which features were missing for you with CircleCI? My experience with CircleCI has been almost entirely positive so far.

We use them for continuous delivery, but there is no way to serialise a deployment. This is pretty critical to not shipping the wrong code at the wrong time – like shipping code that uses new database fields before the database migration to add them.

There is a third party orb that attempts to do this, but it costs significant numbers of build credits to run as it implements queueing of builds as busy-waiting, plus we've got evidence that there are bugs in it as we have seen out of order deployments.

It's very difficult or near impossible to build edge-triggered features based on build states. We want to be able to notify when the build goes red, notify for every red build, and notify when it goes green again, and just for the master/deployed branch. This is not possible (you either get all builds or no builds).

There is again a third party orb that implements some of this, but it's pretty inflexible.

We've had them remove features we were sold on. Not huge features, but we were told their billing worked one way, budgeted for it, and then they changed that because they couldn't get it to work correctly. They didn't tell us about this, except for just failing our builds as we were under provisioned on users.

Their support takes on average around 2 working days to respond, and often requires chasing to get a response. Once they do respond it's typically a fairly shallow response without much information, or that has misunderstood the issue, and so queries often take multiple rounds to get help on.

They sell a premium support package, but that is pitched as more about helping you to use the service better and I have an objection to paying for support in getting the service to work in the way it should.

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

#345

Post by danpalmer »

obfk wrote: post #223
danpalmer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely understand the limited time and resources, I can really empathise with that. However I think there are 2 ways in which they could handle this issue better:

1) It's a feature that is fundamental to continuous delivery that is missing, yet CircleCI market themselves as a CI and CD product. I think they need to be more realistic in conversations with customers, in their documentation, in their marketing material, etc, and give significant time in their documentation to workarounds and discussion of the issue.

2) They need to seriously work on their customer communication about the prioritisation system they use. Being constantly told to vote on "ideas" (when they are essentially bug fixes) is quite insulting, and as a customer makes me feel like my input is trivial, it's "nice to haves", rather than being something that genuinely matters to me. They need to have some empathy! Communicating more about the roadmap would be great. Maybe even communicating about all the things from the community site that they are doing each month would be an improvement. Right now it feels like being told our input doesn't matter.

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

#346

Post by mlindner »

emilycook wrote: post #285
mlindner wrote: post #277

I honestly hate gitlab compared to github. So many broken features and half implemented things. It's got all the same problems Jira has (as compared to GitHub which is amazing to use).

Hi, GitLab employee here. Sorry to hear that! This funding should enable us to throw more resources at maturing some of our features (e.g. we tripled our employee count this year). We spun up this product maturity page to make this a little more transparent: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/

Can you please fix in-line commenting? I should be able to click and drag several lines and leave a comment on those several lines specifically. This is something everything from reviewboard to github have had for ages but gitlab still doesn't have. Additionally, gitlab defaults to lots of files not showing their contents in the diff which is extremely frustrating as I need to go click several times to enable the diff.

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

#347

Post by matthewcford »

pm90 wrote: 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…

My experience is that yes new features might get released sooner, but bugs can linger unattended for years.

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

#348

Post by tseabra »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #343
rasz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont understand their UI at all. Whenever some project is hosted on gitlab I just stare at the page for a while and give up.

I work on git hosts integration, we aim to support Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab. I don't understand Gitlab api just like I don't understand their UI. It's confusing. For example while the others call Repo as Repo, Gitlab call Repo as Project, and call Tree as Repo.

I understand your point, however I've come to enjoy the separation between Git concepts (Repository) and GitLab features (Project, Issues, CI/CD).

That said, I still find GitHub's UI and UX more appealing.

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

#349

Post by Nimitz14 »

banachtarski wrote: post #314
Nimitz14 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's wrong. It's actually a "push" instead of "pull", the direction is away from what you're doing not towards you!

It’s a pull “request,” i.e. a request for someone else to pull your changes. I don’t follow your argument.

Or viewed from another perspective (the person initiating) a request for someone else to accept the changes you are pushing.

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

#350

Post by sam1r »

Confirming I have used GitLab across 10 different domains/entities/projects & have had zero issues. IMO... both GH + GL are here to stay. Here's how I evaluate how to use for each one.

=> GitHub = OSS street cred. [You might want to get hired or want to showcase your skills]

=> GitLab = Business/Enterprise related. [You might want to earn $/make a living... you know.. following your countries' compliancy]

FWIW...My two cents...Both great products, however, different use cases.

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