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Comment by rossmohax | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab isn't big company, 100 devs or so, they try to target much bigger fish (>2000 devs) with their product, yet they can't make it work even for their scale: Kubernetes , monitoring, CI workflows like merge trains and others. So when it comes to putting you money (gitlab.com subscribers) where you mouth is (gitlab.com/features page) they are not there yet.

Kubernetes story is quite telling. They released "cloud native charts" a year or so ago , that is their official way to run Gitlab on Kubernetes, yet when they just dip their toes into kubernetes world, when they switched their docker image registry to run on kube, they've quickly discovered glaring omissions like missing liveness probe and storm of errors on any version update. That is what their customers were sold under the label "ready for Kubernetes".

Same goes for almost every feature.

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Their product marketing pages always remind me of those "kitchen nightmares" shows.

On this episode, an over-ambitious family restaurant decides to expand like crazy and ends up with a huge menu of stuff that the overworked chefs can't cook properly.

Some TV chef should be yelling at them for wasting the opportunity of a lifetime by ignoring good business sense, or something like that.

> Gitlab isn't big company, 100 devs or so

384 engineers, out of a total of 873 employees. I'd say that's a pretty reasonable size.

Hi! GitLab employee, since the OP mentioned something from a year ago I thought it might be worth mentioning that we haven't been this size for very long. Around this time last year we were at 300ish employees, but we've almost tripled this year thanks to a huge hiring push.

> yet when they just dip their toes into kubernetes world, when they switched their docker image registry to run on kube, they've quickly discovered glaring omissions like missing liveness probe and storm of errors on any version update.

You are right, we had some missteps with the Helm chart that were unfortunately not discovered by others or us. Our test cases of scaling registry up and down worked perfectly in all our synthetic tests we did so it was not obvious to us that the liveness probe was missing. In hindsight it is quite obvious but at that time we had 16 other charts to write and some things did slip through. For a number of other services, community and paying users were reporting issues that we solved as we went further. Registry is one of the components that receives traffic in bursts so for majority of users this was probably never an issue or it was one of those "gremlin" moments.

For GitLab.com the things are quite different. We hold 2PB of data in docker images alone and there is continuous flow of traffic. For GitLab.com scale, none of the services we are porting to K8s have the luxury of the bursty traffic so we are careful in how and when we switch over traffic. The good thing is that all the edge cases we found are fixed and now in the Helm charts releases so that users can really put this on k8s as ready. If you are curious on all the issues we had to cover during this process, see the main registry migration epic https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/gl-infra/-/epics/70 .

It is also worth nothing that over time, the omnibus-gitlab package has benefited greatly from being used to deploy to GitLab.com. As we migrate more of the workloads into kubernetes using the charts, we expect to see some of the same benefits and insights there. See our handbook for more details on how we use dogfooding: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/#dogfooding

Every case of dogfooding brings tremendous benefits to the depth and quality of your offering, no doubt about it and these improvements are very much welcome. Issue I have is not with dynamic, but with the current state of affairs, were wide spectre of features are presented as ready, yet they are not as high quality as Gitlab marketing.

(GitLab employee) thank you so much for the feedback! We agree that a lot of our features aren't as polished as they seem to be presented, which is why we hope the Maturity page adds more transparency.

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