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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to know if you think this work is within the core competency of GitLab. if so, how did you decide it was. If not, how do you realize the investment over time in something that isn't? Is the GitLab CEO here?

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GitLab CEO here. Hardware and hosting are certainly not our core competencies. Hence all the questions in the blog post. And I'm sure we made some wrong assumptions on top of that. But it needs to become a core competency, so we're hiring https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/production-engineer/

> But it needs to become a core competency, so we're hiring

Impressive.

I think you're under estimating the number of people required to run your own infrastructure. You need people who can configure networking gear, people swapping out failed NICs/Drives at the datacenter, someone managing vendor relationships, and people doing capacity planning.

I think you could probably get the IO performance you're talking about in your blog post from AWS instances or Google Cloud's local NVMe drives, but if you truly need baremetal, I'd recommend Packet or Softlayer. Don't try to run your own infrastructure or in a year you'll be: https://imgflip.com/i/1fs7it

I love that this question baited your well-known introduction out again. Wasn't there a post at some point that searched for 'GitLab CEO here' on this very site, just for kicks and giggles?

I would challenge your assertion that you need a core competency in bare metal. AWS and GCE are performant enough--you're just not using them correctly. Invest in IaaS expertise and be successful; invest in bare metal at this day and age and live to regret it forever.

You are ruling out providers like OVH because lack of sufficient SLA but then you are replacing it with your own solution that will have no SLA.

Lower your SLA requirements and go with multiple providers like OVH. Make your site work at multi datacenters. At the end of the day your users will be much happier.

My 2 cents.

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