Turns out Gitlab is hosted on Azure
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> We’re not just excited about offering this integration for you to use, we’re excited to use it ourselves! We’re already in the process of migrating GitLab.com to Google Cloud Platform. For us, the primary reason to migrate was because it has the most mature Kubernetes platform. By moving, we get access to security functionality like default encrypted data at rest, a broad, ever-expanding list of localities served globally, and tight integration with our existing CDN for faster caching. Be on the lookout for more information on our migration as it progresses.
Regardless, self hosting, or a federated solution, should be a better exit route.
More so for developers with smaller projects, or with few collaborators or none. There was never really a good reason to lock oneself into Github to begin with.
There was one good reason - that's where other people were. Open source is fundamentally very much a social phenomenon, even if often in a specific, nerdy way of being social.
That GitLab uses/used Azure is public knowledge. They've blogged and spoken about it extensively - and that they are given a large amount of resources for free as part of their use too.
Not only that, they conducted a full infrastructure review and potential migration plan in full public view - again discussing widely their use of Azure and why the switch to bare metal wasn't going to work.
There have been multiple discussions about this here on HackerNews.
I surprised that anyone wouldn't know that Gitlab was on Azure.
It's still good to spread the word I guess - though to suggest it's somehow newly discovered information is a little disingenuous.