
Update on Our Planned Move from Azure to Google Cloud Platform - octosphere
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/19/gcp-move-update/
======
octosphere
Just as a sidenote: Gitlab may no longer be accessible any more from Crimea,
Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. From the article:

    
    
        NOTE to users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria
        GitLab.com may not be accessible after the migration to Google.
        Google has informed us that there are legal restrictions that are
        imposed for those countries. See this U.S. Department of the
        Treasury link for more details. At this time, we can only
        recommend that you download your code or export relevant
        projects as a backup.

~~~
wereHamster
Kinda sad that GitLab doesn't point to VPN providers that those users could
use to route around this legal issue.

~~~
Operyl
That opens a can of worms from a legal perspective, and they are a US
business..

EDIT: It's one thing to accidentally be violating an embargo, it's another
thing entirely to suggest ways to bypass it on your company site.

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Kudos
Why is it that Microsoft are ok with serving traffic from countries under
embargo but Google are not? As far as I know Amazon don't follow the embargo
like this with AWS traffic either.

~~~
djsumdog
Aren't many of the Azure data centers actually contracted out to other
independent companies in those respective countries?

~~~
Kudos
That's to deal with local restrictions, not to deal with US trade embargoes.

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kerng
I'd say it's a positioning move by Gitlab to be a better acquisition target
for Google. They might have hoped for Microsoft buying them, but since
Microsoft beat Google in getting a hold of Github, they now are realigning.
Makes sense.

~~~
ganeshkrishnan
For sure this is a political move to get closer to Google and antagonizing
GitHub which has gone to MS.

Weird for me as I love gitlab and azure equally.

~~~
mikewhy
This has been planned since before the GitHub acquisition.

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tubaguy50035
Kinda neat how careful they were to not say Azure performance was terrible.

~~~
nine_k
Was it? Are there any numbers?

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kshitij_libra
Assuming a buy, gitlab becomes part of gcp offering in the coming future ? :D

~~~
jasonvorhe
That would be a pretty awesome development. But Google buying a Rails platform
would be kind of a surprise move.

~~~
dotjosh
I'd bet "being on the Rails stack" would carry little weight if they were
deciding to acquire them.

~~~
londons_explore
Software stack is actually a pretty big decider.

php was pretty much a dealbreaker for google acquisition years ago. It pretty
much means google might be happy to buy shares in the company as an
investment, but won't buy the whole company and plan to integrate it into
their own offering.

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samstave
Has anyone yet built a tool which will deploy an environment to all three
major cloud providers and bench mark them against each?

~~~
geofft
There are a few "cloud portability" companies, but the fundamental problem
with this approach is that cloud providers don't offer the same APIs and
pricing models. If all you want is virtual machines and block storage, you can
do it, but the answer is that your site is going to be more expensive on _any_
of the providers than if you built it for an architecture that fits your
cloud.

If you design for the strengths of, say, Amazon Lambda, you can't use Google
Cloud Functions / Azure Functions directly. Most likely you'll just run it on
top of self-managed VMs on the other clouds, making Amazon the "clear" winner.
If you design for GKE, you'll find that Amazon and Azure's Kubernetes support
isn't as good, but maybe there was a better design for your site that wasn't
based around GKE. And so forth.

And if what you actually want is a fixed amount of compute capacity and block
storage and you'll just manage OSes yourself (either because that's actually
better for your needs, or because you're operating something that predates
containers/serverless/object storage/etc. and the development work to get it
there is expensive), just get some dedicated servers in colo, it'll be cheaper
than any cloud for that model.

~~~
samstave
Exactly my point for the most part.

The fact that you basically had to provide a ELI5 here on HN for this, shows
what a dismal job we, as an industry, have done to educate the larger world as
to the best-practice of cloud selection should be.

We, on HN, for the most part, can spout off this tribal-domain knowledge
because we live it most days.

But what would be great is to have these types of nuggest of information,
empiracally delineated, available without effort to those who would like to
know.

Specifically, in a way format/method where you don't need to have the lexicon
to be able to formulate the proper question.

Most people, even those IT people who may work for a tiny office who has very
little need for anything "at scale" may not be able to ask the questions.

An analogy could be (?): "everyone knows if they need a bike, motorcycle, car,
truck or bus - and everyone should be able to assess their basic computing
needs as well. It should be fairly clear if you need a single machine in an
office, a colo or a cloud - and figuring out a path to doing so and selecting
a vendor should be a straightforward task."

~~~
clarry
Selecting a car is not straightforward at all.

~~~
jessaustin
Yes, it really is. Anything you buy new will get you around and be
(relatively) safe. If you're buying used, you have to know enough to check the
right things or you have to hire a mechanic, but assuming that, for anything a
decade old or less it will be the same. If you're talking about value,
acceleration, fuel efficiency, etc. that's a matter of taste and your
statement is equivalent to, "selecting a wine is not straightforward at all."

------
w8rbt
Seems silly to move just because MS bought github. Are there other compelling
reasons?

~~~
simcop2387
They had started this move months before Microsoft purchased Github. If you
read the linked article one of the biggest reasons is that the GCP
implementation of kubernetes and better integration with their CDN they'll be
getting a significant performance boost. It's taken this long since they've
had to make infrastructure changes along with some code changes to get it
better supporting the deployment there.

~~~
scurvy
What meaningful CDN integrations are in Google Cloud?

~~~
jacques_chester
Presumably:
[https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/](https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/)

