Comment by jl-gitlab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jl-gitlab | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the incredible feedback! CI/CD product director here. A few thoughts:

- Templates

We actually have done a lot here recently, we've improved includes so that they have a lot more flexibility (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#include), and have even refactored our own Auto DevOps implementation to take advantage of this: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/#using-componen.... In this way, you can have included behaviors across your projects that can then be updated in bulk.

- Build results

We are planning on adding testing results over time in our vision for this year, thank you for confirming this is important from your point of view. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1020

- Overall view of runner status

We did recently add pipeline info to the operations dashboard (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/operations_dashboard/), which I know isn't exactly what you're looking for here but we are making progress in this direction and recognize the gap.

- Dashboard

The next improvement we're making to that operations dashboard is adding environments. You can see the in-progress issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/3713

- System wide configs

This can be achieved by using includes to set the variables, which is admittedly a workaround. We do have an open issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3897) to implement instance level variables that would solve this.

- Extensibility

This is an interesting one because Plugins are, at least in my opinion, what makes Jenkins a mess to use in reality and believe me, I've managed plenty of Jenkins instances in my career with lots of "cool" plugins that do something great, at least while they work. It is one of our values that we play well with others, though, so I'd be curious to work with you to understand specifically what you'd like to be able to make GitLab do that can't be done through your .gitlab-ci.yml. Our goal is that you should never be blocked, or really have to jump through hoops, but still not have to be dependent on a lot of your own code or third party plugins.

I hear you on plugins, and I agree they are problematic. I went back and forth on whether to include this or not TBH.

I'll give you a couple of examples of use cases for plugins:

We have an artifact repo that can store NPM, Python and other artifacts (Nexus if you're interested). I wrote a plugin for TeamCity that can grab artifacts from a build and upload them to the repository. Obviously this can be done in a script, but there are a couple of things that make doing it in a plugin nice:

- You can set it up as a reusable build feature that can be inherited from templates (i.e. all builds of a particular type publish artifacts to Nexus)

- You can get nice UI support. The plugin contributes a tab to the build page that links to the artifacts in Nexus.

- The plugin can tie in to the build cleanup process, and remove the artifacts from the repository when the build is cleaned up. This is useful for snapshot/temporary artifacts that you want to publish so people can test with, but have automatically removed later.

Another example of where plugins have proved useful is influencing build triggering: we have some things that happen in the build server, and then other stuff happens outside of the build server. When all that completes, we then want to kick off another process in the build server (that sounds abstract - think an external deploy process runs, and once the deploy stabilizes you kick off QA jobs). In TeamCity you can write a plugin that keeps builds in the queue until the plugin reports that they are ready to run.

While plugins aren't the first tool I reach for when looking at how to provide reusable functionality in a build server, I have written several plugins for both Jenkins and TeamCity. Overall, I don't think Jenkins/TeamCity's model of having plugins run in-process is a good one, and it leads to most of the problems people have with them (although TeamCity is much better here: Jenkins basically exposes most of its guts to plugins which makes keeping the API stable virtually impossible, while TeamCity has APIs specifically designed for plugins that they've been able to keep stable very effectively) A model where a plugin was just a Docker container that communicated with the build server through some defined APIs, combined with some way for it to attach UI elements to a build that could then call back into the plugin would be much nicer. This seems to be more like what Drone is doing, but haven't played around a lot with that.

I think Gitlab has a strong philosophy of wanting to build out everything that anyone will ever need, all nicely integrated, and that's a great ideal. I think in practice, it's REALLY hard to be all things to all people. People have existing systems and/or weird use cases that it just doesn't make sense to handle all of, and plugins are a useful tool in addressing that.

Thanks for sharing, this is really great feedback.

If you work at gitlab, you can download the free version of TeamCity on their website. Setup a few projects and it will be obvious what it does better.

You may want to try a C#, java, python and a go projects to see the differences, with slaves on Windows and Linux. There are some pretty tight integrations for some of these.

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