
GitLab announces $4M series A funding from Khosla Ventures - jobvandervoort
https://about.gitlab.com/2015/09/17/gitlab-announces-$4M-series-a-funding-from-khosla-ventures/
======
yarper
Maybe with this 4M they can stop producing workflow crushing bugs. I'm getting
a bit tired of explaining to my boss why first he can't search the code
because our repo is too big, then search doesn't work in firefox, then when he
gets through the diff/file is too large (we've only recently seen the syntax
highlighting start to work too).

Then after someone does the work, then they can't assign the MR because of
glitchy privs!

If anyone is reading this at gitlab, please don't take this personally. I
wouldn't leave gitlab, I just need the core 80% of the functionality to work
flawlessly, and my upgrades to work without half of my team moaning at me for
having faith that this upgrade will be the gold edition we need.

Also like most people that I've spoken to, we're not interested in gitlab-ci
at all (we already have a ton of buildscripts in jenkins). If we didn't like
jenkins we'd be using stash/bamboo right now.

~~~
scrollaway
> Also like most people that I've spoken to, we're not interested in gitlab-ci
> at all

Consider me part of the crowd that is very interested. Travis is atrociously
bad. Jenkins I've heard some good things about but I have mostly negative
experiences with it. Alternatives are needed. And something like gitlab would
sorely lack if it didn't have CI integration.

~~~
daxelrod
Could you expand on what you hate about Travis? I'm in the process of picking
a CI system and haven't found too many negatives about Travis yet.

~~~
shabda
I was using travis-ci for a long time. One day my credit card died during
their billing cycle. They emailed overdue receipts to colaborators on all my
travis-ci repos. All clients, all devs, everyone. Thats breach of information,
I don't want client1 to know who all are employed at client2's firm.

Ok, fine, bugs exists in software. I emailed them saying that 'Guys, you
should email only repo owner when payment fails, no everyone on the team". No
response. I considered that lack of support and moved to circleci.

------
BinaryIdiot
So this is a little bit "in the weeds" but with the seed round closing back in
July for $1.5 million why such a short turnaround for the series A? Is this
normal? Considering it probably takes at least a month to close out a round
does that mean GitLab went back out to fund raise only a month after their
$1.5 million investment?

Not trying to be critical or anything I'm just really curious.

~~~
sytse
Khosla invested in our seed round and we kept talking with them. They are a
great investor so we are happy they wanted to do our A round. So we raised an
A earlier than we expected beforehand. We still haven't touched the seed
money, in our last month we were cash-flow positive. But I'm happy we did a
priced round and can focus on growing knowing we have enough cash.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Good to hear. Thanks!

------
vessenes
Congratulations. I was just remarking at work that Gitlab is awesome. It's an
open source project that 100% does what it says on the tin; we downloaded and
installed, and haven't had to worry about it since.

~~~
mdk754
Agreed. They are a shining example of what I look for in a commercial company
building an open source product. Self-hosted, community edition with no
fundamental deficiencies, hackable, and a CEO with more 3rd party presence
(he's always on here in the comments) than anyone could ever ask for.

I only wish it were written in something which compiles native, like C or Go.
Not bad enough to switch to anything else however, and it's really just my own
personal dislike for Rails/Ruby.

Love the Gitlab-CI integration too, and am excited to see how it
grows/improves over time.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for all the kind words!

We love the speed of Go. That is why with GitLab 8.0 we'll make gitlab-git-
http-server the default way to clone repositories. For CI the runner that
executes the tests [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-
runner](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner) is already
written on Go so it is portable and installs without dependencies.

We expect that for the majority of the functionality a high level language
will continue to be the best choice. Personally I'm watching Elixir and its
Phoenix framework that are very fast. But for the foreseeable future we're
very happy with Ruby and Rails.

------
aaronmiler
Switched a lot of personal projects over to GitLab, and been really happy. I'm
very excited to see this. My only complaint is the lack of integrations from
the rest of the world. It's pretty hard to find good services that hook into
GitLab

Note: I'm talking about hooking into gitlab.com not a self hosted instance

~~~
sytse
We would love to see more support for GitLab.com. Things are moving the right
way with
[https://about.gitlab.com/applications/](https://about.gitlab.com/applications/),
also CodeShip is considering support now as are many others. But we have some
way to go, please keep telling the services on Twitter. By the way, what
integration would you like to see first?

~~~
aaronmiler
CodeShip would be awesome, I'd also love to see CodeClimate support. I didn't
know about
[https://about.gitlab.com/applications/](https://about.gitlab.com/applications/),
I'll make sure to keep an eye on it

~~~
sytse
Thanks!

------
izolate
I have to say I was wrong about GitLab. I moved my team over to Gogs due to
getting various 500 errors with GitLab. Gogs admittedly did feel faster,
though I reckon that's due to it having a simpler codebase and perhaps Golang.

Anyway, after discovering the errors I was getting was most probably caused by
an insufficient server, I migrated back to GitLab, this time on a much larger
instance. It's been nothing but brilliant since.

Well done GitLab!

~~~
sytse
Good to hear that you're back to GitLab izolate! For other people our
requirements can be found in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/doc/inst...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md)

------
codegeek
I tried to use gitlab and was very excited with the self host option. But for
a small business, it was too much hassle with setup, installation and the
biggest issue: huge memory requirement. On a DigitalOcean droplet of 512MB, it
was too slow. I switched to Bitbucket private repo.

May be i was not doing something right.

~~~
gtaylor
> May be i was not doing something right.

Here you go:

> On a DigitalOcean droplet of 512MB

I'm not sure it's realistic to expect great performance on a tiny droplet in a
budget provider that over-provisions the heck out of these tiny instance
sizes.

Spend more than $5/month and you may get better results.

~~~
maratd
I have a dozen web apps installed on my personal 512MB droplet and they all
work flawlessly.

~~~
gtaylor
Are your dozen web apps large, featureful code forge systems?

~~~
maratd
No, they're not. That said, there is no valid engineering reason why _any_ web
app should require more than 512MB of memory to run with _minimal user load_.

User load is what bumps up the RAM requirements. If the active user count is
in the single digits and you're running into problems with RAM, either
something is deeply misconfigured on your server, you have a ton of data, or
the codebase is poor.

~~~
chrisseaton
What if your web app manages a data structure that is simply larger than 512
MB? Like analytics data or something like that.

~~~
maratd
Please read what I wrote again. I specifically mentioned a large data set.

------
jobvandervoort
Of course, we're very excited with this opportunity and happy to discuss. Let
us know if you have any questions.

------
peteforde
I am feeling naive but I have to ask: why GitLab? Is there something it does
that GitHub does not do? I assume that I'm missing something but it seems like
the big feature here is "not GitHub" which is hard to sell to the higher-ups.

~~~
ouiyaaa
1995: I'm feeling naive, but I have to ask, why Unix? Is there something
Microsoft doesn't have? 2005: OMGZ M$ monopolyzzz

Seriously, competition is good. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not.
Always keep a copy of Github repo as a Gitlab repo. Learn about git remote-
add. Github was DDOSd a few months back, don't let that stop your work.

~~~
stephenr
Mostly I agree except for the bit about Github being DDOS'd "stopping work".

I never understood quite how the same people who were chomping at the bit
declaring "git is our saviour" 5 years ago, are the same people who now claim
to be "unable to work" because GitHub is not available...

~~~
lvillani
GitHub is not just a place to host Git repos. It has an issue tracking system,
wikis, pull requests, integrations with 3rd party tools, and reviews done
through a pretty web interface.

If you rely on those parts of GitHub and it gets DOS'd, your workflow suffers.

~~~
stephenr
For reference, GH wiki's are just git repos of Markdown files. You can
pull/push just as you would a regular repo.

For the other things: I know the things it offers, and how much certain people
get attached to them (as if GH somehow _invented_ simple issue management). I
didn't say you can work when GH is offline for a week. If it's down for a few
hours it seems unlikely people would not be able to work at all because of it.

Honestly all of this is why I very much prefer open, simple things that can
work offline:

* GH wikis are a good example of this.

* BugsEverywhere could be a good replacement for a purely centralised issue tracker.

Some things (e.g. CI builds) are generally likely to need a central repo up to
pull from, but in general I believe that if you embrace and rely on open and
simple tools, your options to avoid network/vendor related issues are much
greater.

------
romanovcode
Nice! I really hope some competitor to GitHub will arrive someday soon.

~~~
sytse
I think we're already there, what would you like to see?

~~~
drewcrawford
Let me tell you my regular frustration, as a person migrating tons of stuff to
GitLab.

1\. Google "GitLab [obvious feature]"

2\. Land on feedback.gitlab.com, on a feature request with hundreds of upvotes

3\. "We're accepting pull requests"

4\. Filed in 2013

5\. Still open

6\. Sigh loudly.

7\. Check the blog for what evidently more important features they've been
working on instead

8\. "We're very excited to announce that we'll ship GitLab Mattermost, an open
source, on-premises messaging app"

9\. Sigh loudly

10\. Conclude that they are probably an open source company strapped for cash
and to cut them some slack

11\. See HN article about closing series A

12\. "Oh good, now they can finally get to their epic feature backlog"

13\. "I think we're already there, what would you like to see?"

14\. Sigh loudly.

Don't get me wrong, I love GL. But wow is that workflow annoying.

~~~
sytse
There are 1000+ features open on feedback.gitlab.com, we can't make them all.
If people contribute them that is a strong signal they are wanted. What is the
feature you would like to see?

------
jpope
Maybe with this they can finally get gitorious.org is migrated to Internet
Archive... :/

~~~
sytse
The Internet Archive people are working on it. They are kinda busy and there
is not much we can do at this point.

------
umziehennachbar
free private repos? is this a limited time offer or something you'll stand by
forever? how many repos?

~~~
BinaryIdiot
They've had this for a while now and is one of the main reasons I ended up
using GitLab for some of my side projects. I don't think this is going away I
think it's just another part of their business model.

~~~
sytse
It is, our on-premises income is more than enough to pay for GitLab.com. We
might introduce more paid plans in the future but I don't expect you'll ever
have to pay for the things we offer for free now.

