Up until this week I was in love with Gitlab. We've been using it at work for over a year as our main repo, code review tool and CI (tried self-hosted first, then moved to gitlab.com).
However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying builds and deployment jobs. Yesterday we tried, unsuccessfully, moving to the new AWS tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline), and today we just moved back to Bitbucket + CircleCI (we use RoR if you are wondering).
Unfortunately today I couldn't seriously recommend gitlab.com to anyone needing a reliable hosted repo + CI solution (maybe self-hosted works better though, YMMV).
Regardless, I have a deep respect for what Gitlab as a company has done so far. After looking into repo + CI options I've realized that they've created probably the best all-in-one platform out there, at least their vision/concept. Wish them the best and hope to use their service again in the near future once they have their stuff together.
Hi Nico, I'm sorry that you suffered our unreliability this week. We do try to update @gitlabstatus for everything that we see happening, no matter how small. We're determined to make GitLab.com a reliable platform, but we realize we still have a long way to go.
Thank you. I'm still a big fan of Gitlab and the vision you guys have. You've built an amazing organization and you'll definitely keep doing great things. Look forward to using your platform again in the future :)
> However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of
> them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account.
> For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our
> whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying
> builds and deployment jobs.
Do you happen to have some examples of these problems? I recall there are some
known problems with CI runners getting stuck, but I'm wondering if you were
running into other problems as well.
Those are exactly the problems we were running into. Our pipelines ran 3 consecutive stages (lint, test, deploy). Because every push and every merge triggers a pipeline, and because every stage runs a job, almost anytime we did anything on gitlab.com something (or everything) would get stuck. This slowed our dev/deploy process to a crawl, to the point where we spent all of Monday pretty much just checking, waiting for, or retrying jobs. Sometimes we would merge a branch and an hour later none of the jobs in the pipeline had even started (had status created or pending). Yesterday (Tuesday) things were still pretty much the same. Today we just moved on.
Jobs getting stuck might not seem like a big deal, but when every dev on the team needs to manually check every 5 minutes to make sure things are running and retrying everything, while clients are waiting on a hotfix, bugfix or a new feature that we promised we would ship by a certain deadline, then the issue becomes critical.
Great question :) We are a small team so we prefer focusing on writing code than managing our infrastructure.
Keeping even just one server secure and up to date is no small task. Additionally, in this particular case, given Gitlab pushes changes pretty often, we wanted to have access to the latest stuff without having to update the self-hosted instance every time (with the added risk of screwing up in the process). I guess there's a trade off for everything.
GitHost seems incredibly expensive. For $150/mo for their most basic plan I could easily rent a basic dedicated server or VPS from for $10-40/mo. In my experience this takes about a 1 day investment up front then 1 hour/mo (basically just update the box or replace a failing drive once in a while) to maintain indefinitely if you keep it behind LAN/VPN. It's a fairly small time investment with a big reward for security, privacy and stability in my experience. Then you have control of backups too, which seems like a pretty good thing to me given the recent GitLab fiasco.
I've been having the very same experience and were also seriously considering moving off of gitlab at this point. It's a shame but the amount of hours lost are starting to become entirely unjustifiable.
However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying builds and deployment jobs. Yesterday we tried, unsuccessfully, moving to the new AWS tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline), and today we just moved back to Bitbucket + CircleCI (we use RoR if you are wondering).
Unfortunately today I couldn't seriously recommend gitlab.com to anyone needing a reliable hosted repo + CI solution (maybe self-hosted works better though, YMMV).
Regardless, I have a deep respect for what Gitlab as a company has done so far. After looking into repo + CI options I've realized that they've created probably the best all-in-one platform out there, at least their vision/concept. Wish them the best and hope to use their service again in the near future once they have their stuff together.