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Comment by jlengrand | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a total Gitlab fanboy. I was going to Sid's meetups back in Utrecht 6 years ago, and he's a model of mine to this time.

I would have done anything to stay on the platform, for at home and the office and setup gitlab instances in two different offices.

Since somewhere last year, I moved back to Github primarily, and I'm sad to hear that my company is likely to make the same choice soon.The only reason is stability, and that's a little sad to me. I really want to love the product, but I need something that just works; not bells and whistles

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Whenever GitHub is down you see comments saying much the same thing only with the names reversed.

The thing that strikes me each time is how fragile everyone's setup is if GitHub/lab is a single point of failure for them...

At least gitlab let's you self host, which would let you run backups on offsite hosting meaning zero downtime.

GitHub's uptime is way better than GitLab. I am not really sure gitlab.com even reaches 99% availability (not to mention 99.9%).

GitLab may well be focused on providing full-stack dev-services (VCS, build-server, CI and stuff), but in the end they are a hosting company - and for hosting, uptime is one of the most important metrics.

EDIT: 99% was exaggerating, but I got so many 50Xs the last days that it was from time to time unusable.

I agree that GitHub's uptime is better, but I doubt that Gitlab aren't at 99% availability - that'd mean over 14.4 minutes of downtime each day.

We have some public Pingdom stats at http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/history, looks like this was the first time we dipped below 99.9% this year (partial outages excluded).

But yeah, our response times have been steadily increasing and could definitely be a lot better ;-)

You can see GitLab.com's uptime here via pingdom:

http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/2019/11 (99.75%)

http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/2019/10 (99.98%)

http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/2019/09 (100%)

http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/2019/08 (100%)

http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/2019/07 (100%)

http://stats.gitlab.com/4932705/2019/06 (99.98%)

EDIT: I see one of my colleagues also posted here, I wasn't asked to and I'm doing it of my own accord. I assume they are as well, but I can only speak for myself.

Ok, I admit that 99% was exaggerating, but you sure should make availability of gitlab.com your main focus - and you promise that for years to the users (linking at issues etc.).

Btw.: Your links are http, and the https version has `SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN` - you should check with pingdom.com maybe?

Agreed, nobody's perfect.

My experience with github is much better though on average. Haven't had a single bad experience personally the past year for my personal stuff. Not once. Github does only one thing, the CI is usually somewhere else so there have less reasons to fail as well... It might be comparing apples and oranges.

We use Gitlab at the office and it is constantly slow. Might be our setup I agree, but in the end it also tarnishes the brand to me.

All in all, my general experience is that speed and stability has degraded over the past years, in favor of the 'whole in one devops pipeline'. Github stayed focus on its core market.

>Github does only one thing, the CI is usually somewhere else so there have less reasons to fail as well... It might be comparing apples and oranges.

This is changing with Github Actions.

> This is changing with Github Actions.

Well gitlab does artifactory/docker management, security, value stream management, . . . So still

GitHub now has package registries and security scans too, and adding more features to complete the lifecycle.

Wasn't aware. Will look into it. Thanks!

To be fair, Over the last 5 years, I've been hit by several Github outages and never been hit with a Gitlab outage. The reason? I don't use Gitlab during my working day. Similarly with this one, I wasn't doing anything on Gitlab when it went down.

Interesting. My issues have been in the evening :). Are you in the US? I am EU based

I'm in Japan :-)

Zero downtime is an ideal that you'd need a lot of investment for to achieve. I mean for 99.99999% uptime you'd already need to have a multi-server, multi-AZ, multi-region and multi-cloud setup and orchestrate data parity between those environments. That's not easy to set up and maintain.

Yes.

Tell that to all the companies that have to stop working when either of these sites go down because they've built their entire workflow on GitHub/lab being up.

Since zero downtime is so costly, maybe it's a better idea not to rely on the uptime of a third party?

You're wrongly assuming that your own service will have a better uptime.

Given git's distributed nature, I can't imagine either service going down for a day could have that enormous of an impact. I'd be curious to know how people manage that. I would think other services which point to git.* would largely have some option for a manual work around, or would not be utilized in mission critical roles.

But git is not truly distributed. Each 'node' in the network does not automatically gets access to new trusted nodes (remotes). Management of the distributed nature is still manual, meaning that your CI/CD system cannot suddenly pull changes from your local developer machine, instead of GitHub/GitLab/Gerrit/...

In an ideal world, each commit is cryptographically signed and automatically distributed to a large number of nodes. Only correctly signed commits would be picked up by CI/CD and the build artifacts would use the digital signature of the code to further deploy the resources in a trustworthy manner.

Its mostly about the project management, issue tracking, pull requests, CI/CD, releases and other features being unavailable. Not the source code itself.

Continuous integration is typically not distributed, and it blocks releases.

Github also supports self-hosting.

Yes, https://github.com/enterprise

Sure, it is unfortunately above the monthly budget that my wife allows me to spend :)

Yes but not for free.

>> At least gitlab let's you self host, which would let you run backups on offsite hosting meaning zero downtime.

Zero downtime but not zero maintainence cost. I think the administration of a full CI/CD environment (not only the gitlab machine, also the runners, the network etc.) are the main factor for this.

GitHub also lets you self-host.

Totally off topic: also went to those meetups in Utrecht! They were small fish then. Cray what can happen in ~6 years.

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