
Every software system used at Gitlab - ksj2114
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/tech-stack-applications/#tech-stack-applications
======
airlines55
I'm so sick of Gitlab support spam in every thread that mentions any issue,
making it so that critical conversations are interrupted with self serving
pitches!

>I once saw Gitlab do this thing.

>Hey, Bob from Gitlab thing here. We are really trying to make thing great for
our customers . Our next release of thing will do foo which we hope will fix
this. Here is a link to a marketing post comparing us to GitHub. Hope that
helps. Please don't mention us in a comment, or I have to do this. It hurts to
live.

~~~
dominotw
Their CEO is the worst offender. Shows up on every gitlab thread with these
generic/uninteresting comments.

~~~
airlines55
The thing is - I get it. I thi k it's cool when people show up to talk about
their product or code that is mentioned on a forum. It's endearing. But when
it's systematized by a large corporation, it's no longer so.

------
afandian
We've just had a bad experience with GitLab annual renewal, to the point where
we didn't know if they'd cancelled our account or not.

The billing accounts system seems to be completely disconnected from user
accounts. A notification banner was spammed to users in the GitLab.com user
interface, saying that our account was going to be cancelled becuase we didn't
have auto-renew. The users who got the banner didn't have permission to act on
it in the billing system. The billing system said that we _were_ on track to
renew, which disagreed with the banner. Eventually it transpired that the end-
of-year "truing up" meant that our account was on hold, but we weren't
notified of this.

And when we _did_ pay the bill we get a banner saying "you've been downgraded
to the free plan" when the gitlab.com interface says we hadn't.

It really undermined confidence in how well these systems are connected.

On the flip side, the fact that everything is open meant that you can see
customer support reps raising internal bugs about this stuff. The principle of
open-everything makes it more pallatable, but it doesn't make up for lost
confidence.

~~~
mkarampalas
I am a product manager at GitLab and my focus is on making renewals as easy
and pain-free as possible for customers. I am very sorry that you had such a
confusing and frustrating experience here. We are working on a number of
issues that will improve this process, including:

* Making Gitlab.com aware of who the payment owner is so we can more accurately target the renewal banner - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1551](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1551)

* Updating the renewal banner copy for group owners that aren't payment owners so they don't attempt to renew if they do not have the right permissions - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1553](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1553)

* Moving the renewal behavior from the customers portal into Gitlab.com so payment owners can more easily manage their subscription and renewal - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1528](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1528)

* Adjusting how we do "true-ups" so they are done quarterly and pro-rated to the end of the subscription instead of in arrears - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/customers-gitlab-com/-/issues/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/customers-gitlab-com/-/issues/1303)

I would love to chat with you to learn more about the challenges you
experienced and to review some of our plans to make things better if you're up
for it. You can reach me directly at mkarampalas[at]gitlab.com

~~~
afandian
Thanks, it's great to see that. Incremental true-ups would be very useful. My
colleague is talking to an account manager directly, but I'll pass your
message on.

------
teen
Gitlab has been pretty great so far, but the code review tooling is so poor I
think I need to look elsewhere. The pull request pages take forever to load,
they can't handle pull requests with over 800 lines well at all. It will
collapse files with over 100-200 lines of changes for seemingly no reason
(hiding the comments within them). You can't ignore whitespace in diffs, and
the comments disappear from the diff if they push new commits, you need to
look at them in the overview again.

~~~
Aeolun
I don’t understand. This describes basically every code review tool I’ve ever
used. If there’s something aside from Gitlab that I should try that still
integrates, I’d love to know.

~~~
gen220
For huge diffs, there’s not much that beats `git checkout <branch> && git diff
HEAD^`.

For leaving comments, pretty much every system I’ve used has issues. At work
we use phabricator; the default settings are atrocious but they can be tuned
to something workable.

I sometimes wonder how hard it would be to get diff reviews to be a first (or
even second) class citizen of the git ecosystem. That way you can finally get
the bliss of leaving review comments in the IDE. They already have “notes”
which are vaguely similar, maybe it’s something they’re considering?

~~~
bostik
> _[git ecosystem] have “notes” which are vaguely similar, maybe it’s
> something they’re considering?_

If you're referring to git-notes, they are ... kinda special. They are objects
in their own namespace that reference the repository objects the notes
themselves are attached to.

Sure enough, you can attach a note to any git-object. And you can view them
either directly or from the git-log view. But the discoverability is lacking,
and the UI of doing pretty much _anything_ with git-notes is absolutely
atrocious. Because they are in their own namespace, you don't automatically
get them when you do a pull or fetch, which can get pretty confusing.

For the curious ones, the magic invocation needed to pull in updates to notes
from the remote repo is:

    
    
        git fetch origin +refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*
    

Notes are not versioned, and you certainly don't get nice N-way merges between
local and remote content. Semantics are different from regular git, and stuff
can get lost.

So from where I'm looking at things, git-notes are not suitable for plumbing
in a code review flow.

~~~
gen220
You're right, I was referring to git-notes and they aren't suitable as
plumbing for code review :)

I was meaning to point out that we've developed plumbing for objects with
"weaker" guarantees than source code, which can still be attached to refs. To
me, this is indicative that the maintainers are willing to accept patches on
things that are outside the "core mission" of versioning source code, and
might mean that they're open to the idea of accepting a well-architected code
review feature.

Although, you're also right, in that there's still a lot of plumbing to make
sure that authors can only edit their own comments, and that sort of thing.
The more I think about it, there's a lot of work to be done and it isn't easy.

But, if you made a proposal, I think git-notes is precedent for them accepting
your contributions. :)

------
spondyl
I don't know if any Gitlabbers are in the comments but I'd be interested to
know: Is this basically your internal asset register open sourced?

I suppose they're not particularly top secret but there could be a version
that has some more sensitive data and this is a safe derivative for example.
Similarly, such an asset register would likely have non-technical assets as
well while this just seems to be tangible, technical things?

I figure any large company with a risk management function will already
have/need such a spreadsheet (or document), complete with some sort of data
classifications to exist for auditing reasons so the interesting step is
maintaining it out in the public.

Kudos to Gitlab for having the culture to allow this sort of stuff :)

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
Err, what is an internal asset register?

~~~
throwaway55554
An asset register is how companies keep track of their assets. Any software
license, computer, monitor, keyboard, copy machine, etc. the company claims as
an asset is tracked in the register.

------
scarface74
And HN users only worry about “cloud lock-in”. I’ve said dozens of times that
the typical largish company is locked in to dozens of SAAS offerings that
would be a major pain and expense to migrate away from.

Once you choose your infrastructure, you might as well go all in. Just look at
their dependence on SalesForce.

------
techntoke
I used to love GitLab, and I still do in a lot of ways but I will no longer
recommend them.

If you're looking for a shiny pretty interface for all your users, then Gitea
can serve the same purpose. Personally, I find cgit to look fine too. I think
GitLab simply tries to do too much, and they've built their entire app on a
poorly scalable and bloated tech stack.

I think SourceHut probably provides the best platform for teaching developers
a more native way to use Git that provides most of the same features as
GitLab. For CI/CD there are so many better options outside of GitLab that
integrate into Kubernetes and you won't regret it.

------
durpkingOP
Why is salesforce the center of attention?

~~~
threeseed
Because it is the source of truth for all of your customers both current and
future.

And surely customers should be the centre of everyone's business.

~~~
swah
Like OP, I'd love to understand better what Salesforce does (so well, it
seems).

Its a bit hard to imagine, just like SAP software (for me), since all your
experience is on industries far from that world.

~~~
edumucelli
In their documentation Gitlab explains the usage they have of Salesforce, you
may get a non-Gitlab specific view of it, for example:
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/customer-success/using-
sal...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/customer-success/using-salesforce-
within-customer-success/)

------
hnick
Marketo eh? My wife mentioned wanting that in her small business after seeing
a shiny video but I said the price is probably not going to be appropriate
(some research seemed to support this). Does anyone have experience using it?
I have mixed feelings about Adobe but don't know how much influence they
wield.

~~~
lowdose
If she wants to sell to enterprise Marketo is a good option because of the
deal size / volume. Google uses it for selling Google Cloud Platform.
Otherwise Hubspot is probably a better idea.

~~~
hnick
Enterprise is definitely not on the menu, and Hubspot or one of the similar
alternatives does sound more around the level she'd need. I had some fun
messing around with Mautic and it could be fun to learn, but I'm not sure how
its future looks.

~~~
adamfeldman
I’m not a Mautic user, but its future looks brighter now that they were
acquired by the company behind Drupal.

[https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/acqu...](https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/acquia-acquires-mautic-to-deliver-first-ever-open-marketing-cloud)

~~~
hnick
Acquisitions can go both ways and apparently the guy who invented and put a
lot of sweat into it (dbhurley) has parted ways with the project. Also they
used to produce a lot of media on using it, but it's all a couple of years old
now. Maybe that means they got the fundamentals right back then but it does
send a mixed message. I would love to try it, I've set it up and it seems to
be working, but I'm just not sure what'll happen if something goes wrong
(their forum moves a little slow too). I have no special knowledge, just a gut
feel and outsider impressions.

------
inopinatus
I’m wondering where the GL is, for when we outgrow Xero (which was about six
months ago).

~~~
spondyl
This isn't a recommendation or advice but if you're after a ledger that's
larger than what Xero can offer to a big org, Netsuite seems to be what Gitlab
uses and is ironically enough also what Xero uses. Unfortunately (and somewhat
ironically?) we're too big to actually have Xero run on Xero

~~~
inopinatus
If you’d like some feedback, for us it’s less a volume issue and more a case
of design limitations. We run subledgers per customer in our own code for
clearing and settlement (we’re a two-sided network), and posting the rollups
back to Xero sometimes runs into edge cases and limitations. Recognition
timing is one pain point, another is API-driven reconciliation.

What I’d struggle to give up is the ease of reporting. Xero’s report designer
is right in my sweet spot for usability, flexibility, and domain-specific
correctness, probably my favourite reporting tool in three decades of shaking
down business software.

~~~
spondyl
Thanks for your feedback!

While I don't work on the product (directly) or speak in any official
capacity, I can definitely route your pain points and compliments to the
respective teams internally :)

------
transfire
Gracious. That's quite a lot to manage.

~~~
est31
Doesn't seem that much for Gitlab's size. And they are doing an effort to
document it all and write it down instead of having it lie distributed in the
minds of employees managing those services.

------
wyck
I do find it a bit weird you released internal handles and employee names.

~~~
onefuncman
I was amazed to see they doxxed basically every admin they employ... Why
bother securing any data when you can just publish it?

------
AzzieElbab
Surprisingly, does not look too messy

------
msluyter
Curious about whether Salesforce represents a single point of failure. If it
goes down or is unavailable, what impact does that have on the rest of the
organization?

~~~
altacc
In some architectures it can be, which is a risk. A while ago I was in a day
long kick off for a project to replatform a division of a large company, with
Salesforce at the core. As it happens, one of the other division's Saleforce
instance was down the whole day, bringing down everything. Internal systems,
web, sales... everything broken.

We listened to the lesson and the architecture we designed ended up not having
Salesforce as a dependency for any critical or money producing customer facing
functionality.

We used Alteryx as a ETL tool to keep Salesforce in sync in almost real time.
The customer facing sites and services ran off their independent databases.
This also meant that the developers working on that didn't need to know the
details about how Salesforce worked, we just mapped Salesforce data to their
database.

------
rubayeet
Surprised to see Shopify in the list (used for marketing?).

~~~
sytse
Yes, our web store for swag.

------
troquerre
How did GitLab track and create this diagram? Is there a service that does it
automatically?

~~~
FBISurveillance
See [https://app.diagrams.net/](https://app.diagrams.net/) \-- you'll
recognize the style.

~~~
m463
so that seems to be:
[https://github.com/jgraph/drawio](https://github.com/jgraph/drawio)

------
the_jeremy
I notice that Nanoc, the static site generator they use for their docs pages,
isn't mentioned there. Maybe it's just too small to matter?

------
rosywoozlechan
Very nice! Thank you for sharing, I wonder though, no fancy big-screen
dashboard service in there? Do people not value that kind of thing?

~~~
stedaniels
They are a remote distributed team. I don't think their employees would value
having to arrange their workspaces to accommodate a big screen set up high and
at a distance from their workstation.

~~~
rosywoozlechan
Dashboards are nice to have even on remote teams I think. Anyone can put up
the dashboard or make a dashboard for their own screens if they wanted to.

------
zubairov
Nice, just curious counting the filled and dotted lines - how this software is
integrated together?

------
spetron
This is a great stack to learn from.

Does anybody know some other companies that have their business stack
available?

------
kbumsik
As a complete remote company, I wonder if GitLab's business affected much by
COVID-19?

~~~
arnarbi
People still have kids who’d normally go to school, family to take care of,
etc.

~~~
toastal
And there's the mental health and anxiety issues a pandemic and quarantine
bring

------
swyx
hmm.. something's missing. does the dev team itself not use any systems?? hard
to believe

------
oknoorap
Is Salesforce still a big things?

~~~
vips7L
Gigantic and for dev jobs it pays extremely well for easy work.

------
mr-karan
For a company that makes and promotes FOSS, their tech stack sure is dominated
by proprietary SASS vendor lock in solutions.

~~~
threeseed
As someone who has a B2B startup there is almost nothing in the open source
space for Marketing/Sales Ops. And anything that does exist is really low
quality.

And it's because (a) most developers aren't exposed to non-Engineering parts
of the company so they have no understanding of what problem to solve and (b)
it is incredibly lucrative to build a proprietary SaaS solution.

~~~
mr-karan
> there is almost nothing in the open source space for Marketing/Sales Ops

There is [https://erpnext.com/](https://erpnext.com/) which is completely FOSS
built on Frappe framework. If anything, it is rather higher quality than most
SASS solutions out there.

~~~
bdcravens
It's not entirely clear on their website, but I assume the full software is at
[https://github.com/frappe/erpnext](https://github.com/frappe/erpnext), and
they have a model similar to Sentry?

------
jart
s/This website uses cookies/This website got mugu'd by European policymakers/

------
daniel_iversen
Funny how they don't seem to really have any non-specialised tools to
coordinate, manage and track work in a structured way across the company (like
smaller team tools like Trello, or larger ones like Asana). The only cross
company collaboration tool I saw on that diagram was Slack!

~~~
Jarwain
Makes sense considering Gitlab _is_a cross-company collaboration tool; they
eat their own dogfood. They have a whole set of features that compete directly
with Trello/Asana

------
sylvain_kerkour
Wow, I didn't expect so much!

GitLab, here is my proposal: remove 80~90% of this. Keep the essential. Prove
that you are a really innovative company. Stop following analytics. Engage
with your users.

Prove that you can control entropy and recover your agility rather than going
the bureaucratic enterprise software way, just waiting for a more hungry and
foolish player to cut the grass under your feet.

