Hacker News Reader

Comment by ko3us | Hacker News Reader

We’ve been using Gitlab for 4 years now.

What got us initially was the free private repos before github had that.

We are now a paying customer.

Their integrated CICD is amazing. It works perfectly for all our needs and integrates really easily with AWS and GCP.

Also their customer service is really damn good. If I ever have an issue, it’s dealt with so fast and with so much detail. Honestly one of the best customer service I’ve experienced.

Their product is feature rich, priced right and is easy.

I’m amazed at how the operate. Kudos to the team

View on HN

GitLab employee here. Thanks so much for the kind words - I shared it on our internal Slack as a #thanks [1] to the whole team (and specifically our support engineering group who I agree are AMAZING).

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#say-thanks

A thank you from me as well. I self-host gitlab and all our projects are on there.

My experience is quite different. I am experiencing a 500 error on every push to the container registry in my project, I contacted GitLab support over two weeks ago, and the person has clearly no idea how to debug this (and seems very unfamiliar with GitLab, for example couldn't find the web page for my container registry from my Docker image name, e.g. registry.gitlab.com/my/project -> gitlab.com/my/project/container_registry). Very disappointed.

My first experience of gitlab was error 500 during repository search.

It is much better now, good job.

> Their integrated CICD is amazing.

My company switched to BitBucket in order to pinch pennies, and now I weep when I have to get Jenkins and BitBucket to play nice with each other or to do something. GitLab CI just works, is easily horizontally scalable without paying exorbitant prices for more "agents", etc... I miss GitLab...

My company is currently considering switching away from GitLab CI/CD as well as we've found no way to increase the number of available minutes (2000 on our tier I believe, doesn't last very long) without upgrading many tiers before we can even scale it at all. Can I ask what plan you're on? I'm assuming since your company wants to pinch pennies you're also fairly small?

Hi @alipang - Back in April we released the ability to purchase additional minutes for CI runners without upgrading to a more expensive tier.

https://about.gitlab.com/2019/04/22/gitlab-11-10-released/#p...

You can purchase directly from the customers portal at https://customers.gitlab.com and apply them to your group.

Hope that helps!

> Can I ask what plan you're on? I'm assuming since your company wants to pinch pennies you're also fairly small?

We are small compared to FAANG, but not "small" small (~4000 employees total).

We run our own self-hosted GitLab EE instance, so we have "infinite" CI minutes in that the runners are on all our own hardware. So CI is "free" (but we pay for and maintain our own hardware/VMs so I'm not sure how much that costs).

Take a look at https://medium.com/sharenowtech/serverless-gitlab-runner-bui...

Might be useful for you depending on how long your builds take. I haven't personally used it but I it's one of the things on my todo list for next month.

As sibling comments have said you can buy more minutes, but you can also setup your own runners and build to your hearts content on them.

And setting up your own runners is quick and super easy. You can have the administration thing and the build jobs run in their own docker containers, so you have no tough dependencies what distro to run on your CI machine. The only detail I find confusing is the terminology. The administration thing runs in a container called gitlab-runner. The build jobs run in something called runner executor IIRC. These are several containers per job, each with a machine generated name. Partly readable, but can still be confusing if you have lots of them and you need to debug something. On the other hand I assume you cannot debug in the cloud at all (have never tried) so the comparison is still "can be a bit painful" against "impossible" in favor of your own docker-based runners.

Hello! GitLab employee, could you elaborate? You should be able to purchase additional minutes without upgrading what tier you're on: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/issues/37081#note_...

Jenkinsfile + BitBucket works just nicely here.

Getting that to work with GitHub is more painful (pain mostly related to automated webhook-management)

I can't compare to GitLab right now ;-)

Are you using any of the paid Jenkins plugins in the Atlassian Marketplace? Does BitBucket show CI build status on PRs? Can you retry builds from BitBucket or do you have to visit Jenkins dashboard to retry a build? (Just curious, we recently switched, and I'm finding Jenkins to have a much steeper learning curve than GitLab CI had)

Using all free plugins in our place. There is a free bitbucket status notifier that will update the CI build status on a branch / PR. You have to retry via the Jenkins dashboard.

I second that. At work we use Jenkins and BitBucket with no issues at all.

having used gitlab, bitbucket and github.... I gotta say, it really doesn't matter if you don't tie your CI/CD in with any of them.

For CI/CD I quite like Appveyor and Octopus Deploy. But if you are penny pinching, they may not be super appealing, but they are incredibly powerful!

My company was using GitHub and then we were purchased by a company using BitBucket and had to switch over. We don't even use the CI/CD features but IMO the BitBucket experience is just horrible overall.

Concur, trying to get my company to switch. It's the best solution to all modern ci/cd and devops problems: deployment figured out, easy to configure stages, integrate with docker and run integration tests out of the box.

Personally, I stopped using them after they couldn't be bother to give back to other OSS projects which they are using.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com