
Gitlab's Journey from Azure to GCP - soheilpro
https://about.gitlab.com/2019/05/02/gitlab-journey-from-azure-to-gcp/
======
kevinsimper
I personally like Google Cloud, but this blogpost feels a bit like a
advertisement, it seems pretty clear that Google Cloud has offered a better
pricing deal than Azure could and that is why the are moving.

> GCP offered the performance and consistency we needed. A second reason is
> that we believe Kubernetes is the future

Azure does a lot of cool stuff as well, not really a valid reason why you
would move (other than you got a better deal).

~~~
zeusk
You should've seen their ads when Microsoft announced GitHub acquisition.

Maybe GitLab should focus more on their product instead of growth hacking.

~~~
geezerjay
> Maybe GitLab should focus more on their product

To me gitlab already provides the absolute best CICD service. It's like they
need work to provide a better service than any of their direct competitors.

~~~
danpalmer
I've just gone through the process of selecting a new CI/CD provider, and I
think GitLab CI is being let down by its tie in to GitLab.

I've heard great things about GitLab CI, but we aren't looking to move our
version control and there doesn't seem to be a way to have hosted CI from
GitLab without it.

~~~
boleary-gl
GitLab product manager here.

Can I ask where you're hosting your code today? We offer first-class support
for external repositories stored on GitHub with GitLab CI/CD for GitHub [1].
In addition, you can do similar CI/CD integration with _any_ git repository by
URL as well [2]. We see both of these as "minimal" integrations and we're
hoping to add more first-class support for external repositories this yeah -
but would love to know what you'd focus on first if you were Product Manager
for a day :smile:

[1]
[https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/github/](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/github/)

[2]
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/githu...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/github_integration.html)

------
kerng
Microsoft buying Github probably is a big reason Gitlab is a bit sour about
Azure I imagine.

Because overall this reads more like a sponsored post. Google probably offered
a lot of money (good deal) to encourage them to move also.

~~~
qaq
Not sure why you are getting down-voted not having to pay your primary
competitor for services obviously had influence on this decision.

~~~
earenndil
Netflix uses aws, even though amazon has amazon prime video. They don't seem
to have no inclination to move.

~~~
nopzor
netflix pays aws for a very small and non strategic part of their infra. they
dont move bits for videos to their users via aws. that would be insane.

~~~
scurvy
Netflix also arbitrages compute and encode across all major clouds depending
on spot pricing. They treat the commodity...like a commodity.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Since netflix knows they will always be encoding, why would they pay for cloud
provider overhead at all? It would seem to be far cheaper to have a dedicated
fleet.

~~~
paxys
The fact that not even the largest and most compute-intensive software
companies manage their own servers now should really end the cloud computing
cost argument at his point.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Is that true for all such companies?

IME cloud _can_ easily be more expensive and more work than bare metal, in
house or colocated. If course it depends upon the workload and the
tools/resources available to manage it. Even with clouds there is still server
management to do.

~~~
paxys
More expensive - maybe, depending on how good you are at managing runaway
costs.

More work - definitely not. No matter how hard managing your AWS workflows is,
bare metal will always be all that same work plus everything else related to
hardware, cooling, power management, ISP and more.

~~~
apple4ever
But you make one tradeoff for another.

Sure you have "hardware, cooling, power management, ISP and more", but that's
all easy, especially compared to managing AWS workflows.

------
blazespin
Most kube focused customers move to GKE. It really is the best platform and
Google is all in. Azure/AWS/etc see it as a commoditizing platform they don't
control like Google does, so they'll never be the best.

GKE gives a sweet deal to encourage it because they see the long tail
revenues.

It's a pretty easy decision for anyone based on k8s. I see this more a
sponsored ad for kubernetes than I do for Google.

~~~
tw04
>Most kube focused customers move to GKE.

Do you have some sort of citations to back this up? Out of the 20-ish or so
fortune 500s I work with directly and indirectly, not a single one has a gcp
presence and every one of them uses kube somewhere in the business.

~~~
CloudNetworking
Most of those comments come from folks in the startup scene, so that's what
they think the world is.

I worked at MS for a few years and during that time everything looked like
Enterprise to me, which is the opposite effect :)

~~~
influx
For some reason it seems Google Cloud folks also swarm this threads. If
commenters have Google stock, they probably should disclose that on threads
like this.

------
prh8
Lots of eye rolling in this thread, but at this same time, another current
discussion is full of complaints about Azure

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812919)

~~~
carrja99
Par the course for HN. The other day in a GCP thread people were pining for
AWS and wish they could get off of the horrible, non-working Google infra.

In another, folks were pining for the days they could migrate off of AWS for
GCP and the better managed k8s clusters it would give them.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Almost as if this is a community of thousands of people all with different
present needs, future plans, and past experiences.

------
ralph84
GV-funded company gets a great deal on GCP. Film at 11.

------
smoyer
A prelude to Google acquiring GitLab?

~~~
reificator
Oh god please no. I want to be using Gitlab 5 years from now, not planning a
migration back to Github or whatever when Google loses interest in another
toy.

~~~
tinco
The whole reason I picked Gitlab is that it doesn't matter what Gitlab does,
if they pick a weird direction I can just self host and do what I want.

Gitlab is big enough that should they ever be killed by a Google acquisition
(I don't think that's likely), a strong enough community would sprout and keep
maintaining it.

~~~
jrochkind1
Do you have examples of open source software in a similar situation (one
company providing coordination and final approval in the previous project;
similar complexity level to Gitlab, whatever that is), where that happened
successfully?

I'm not challenging necessarily, I legitimately am interested in examples.

~~~
daxelrod
It depends on your definition of “kill”.

OpenSolaris -> Illumos

Hudson -> Jenkins

OpenOffice -> LibreOffice

MySQL -> MariaDB (not killed, but forked out of fear it would be)

And a non-Oracle example:

Node.js -> IO.js (arguable - forked because Node dev was stagnant, eventually
merged)

~~~
oblio
All those had communities outside the main company long before they "moved
out". What's the percentage of external contributors to GitLab? 1%?

------
cpgeier
Is it concerning to anyone else that Google doesn't release revenue figures on
their SEC filings for GCP? I feel like if GCP doesn't get as much traction as
other google services it might go the way of Google Plus or incorporated into
G Suite.

~~~
briffle
Probably the same Reason Microsoft doesn't release revenue figures for Azure.
Azure revenue is lumped in with Office, and not broken out.

------
pbduring
What a coincidence... June is when gitHub was purchased by Microsoft.

Let’s make a prediction: Gitlab will be bought by Google within a year.

~~~
emilycook
GitLab employee, actually our plan is to go public by 2020. Our strategy page
is public:
[https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy](https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy)

------
sonnyblarney
"The fundraising values the startup at just over $1 billion, a company
spokesman said, making GitLab the latest unicorn in the booming market for
digital operations management. Alphabet Inc.’s GV, Iconiq Capital and Khosla
Ventures participated in the financing round."

[1]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-
backs-gitlab-s-quest-to-surpass-microsoft-s-github)

------
nik736
"A second reason is that we believe Kubernetes is the future".

Can someone please link some articles that underline why this is the case?
Thanks

------
jandeboevrie
In their other post you can read that they have just added a few gitaly worker
nodes and got better disk IO by not using raid 5. I don't see why the cloud
provider is relevant here, could all been done on azure.

------
MichaelGlass
I am so tickled by the last names of the speakers. Einstein introduces Jung.

------
ncmncm
Got off Azure just in time!

Here's hoping they get off Google before its meltdown.

But Google probably won't melt down. It will just very, very gradually go all
to hell, like everything else.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Entropy is a bitch. Enjoy life while you can.

------
stevefan1999
Unpopular opinion: The third reason why GitLab decided on the Google Cloud
Platform: political correctness, not only that GitLab doesn't want to nurture
their enemy GitHub, which in turns is acquired by Microsoft causing a
political exodus, and GitLab also fears the ties with Azure will make people
give up to BitBucket or such again. Therefore it’s a pretty good PR stunt
pulled to polarize the situation.

~~~
netheril96
Is this really what “political correctness” means?

~~~
stevefan1999
Well, despite that, sadly consider the fact that it is "politically correct"
to critique Microsoft as "M$", "FUD machine", "evil corp" and "attempted
murderer of free software" in the tech world even to this date.

~~~
throw0824
Aren't the second and fourth just terms they themselves used to describe
themselves/ their goals?

