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Comment by proxysna | Hacker News Reader

Last year I was second guessing myself if migration to Gitlab EE from Jira, Bitbucket and Jenkins would be worth it, as it was a massive shift for my org. Maybe purchasing a DC version of Atlassian products would be a better alternative, but after short look into invoices and licensing it was decided to go forward with Gitlab. Still not a big fan of how stiff Yaml pipelines feel in Gitlab CI and that tickets for what seems like a simple feature [1] hang around for years, but it is nice. Developers like it, and i am happy that they are happy.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/2658

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At a couple startups, I've promoted a mantra of "everything goes into GitLab".

If some information is not in GitLab Git and CI, it should be in GitLab Issues or (ugly) GitLab Wiki.

Those 4 words avoid a lot of problems. Including avoiding a proliferation of silo'd and leaked and lost information in numerous different SaaSes, apps/programs, and storage services that people will tend to do by default.

GitLab team member here. Thanks for sharing.

> If some information is not in GitLab Git and CI, it should be in GitLab Issues or (ugly) GitLab Wiki.

Tip if you have not used it yet: The rich text editor can help with visual editing issues and the wiki: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/rich_text_editor.html

Plus, the cost of gitlab is getting insane. It's very hard to justify the jump, no matter how worth it is. Jira "just works" for now, and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if gitlab raises their pricing even further.

(which I totally understand, they are not profitable yet and have to do a lot of work. It's just that it sucks having to be cautious about who gets access to your instance since you can't have multiple tiers of users, once you use ultimate features everyone has to pay for an ultimate seat)

Gitlab is so absurdly expensive that I’ve basically given up on ever using them.

The stupid thing is I don’t need 90% of their ultimate features, but I do want the remaining 10%.

Yes this is the weird part. I have a very hard time thinking of an organization that would need ultimate features for even 30% of its staff. It's usually super niche features, or features that don't necessarily make sense on an individual seat level but that you have to pay for for every user. It makes the value proposition very hard to see, because sure generating security reporting and auditing are nice but why would we want to have that for every user? The only way to actually manage cost would be to have separate instances for teams which is a nightmare for selfhosting. Especially with the weekly update schedule lol

To me, a flat instance tier pricing + per seat cost would make so much more sense.

GitLab team member here. With GitLab Ultimate, users with the guest role do not consume a seat. To learn more, see https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/self_managed/index....

But there's no way to have an actual "developer" role that isn't using non-ultimate seat right?

I get why in some sense, because once you use ultimate you switch to using a EE install instead of the CE. But I think even having the choice between ultimate and normal paid tiers would be great, even if it means no free users on the instance.

It's interesting that way, I assumed removing the silver tier and not having a real "personal pro" priced tier was just because the long tail wasn't worth it for them if they had to make a support commitment. So to hear the pricing is uncompetitive at larger scales too makes me wonder who they're pricing for

(However, to be fair the free plan includes some stuff that is only on the team plan for github, like 5gb for gitlab free vs 2gb for github teams)

GitLab team member here, thanks for sharing.

> Still not a big fan of how stiff Yaml pipelines feel in Gitlab CI

Maybe the pipeline editor in "Build > Pipeline editor" can help with live linting, or more advanced features such as parent-child pipelines or merge trains.

If you need tips for optimizing the CI/CD pipeline, suggest following these tips in the docs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/pipeline_efficiency.... or a few more tips in my recent talk "Efficient DevSecOps pipelines in cloud-native world", slides from Chemnitz Linux Days 2023 in https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_kyGo_cWi5dKyxi3BfYj...

> and that tickets for what seems like a simple feature [1] hang around for years, but it is nice.

Thanks for sharing. (FYI for everyone) The linked issue suggests a Docker cache cleanup script, which might be helpful. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/27332#n... -> https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/docker.html#clear-t...

Are you using the docker executor, or Kubernetes?

For Kubernetes, we found that GitLab has a tool that automatically does that:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/gitlab-runner-pod-cleanu...

It was just an example of a number of small things and issues, that we were not expecting to be an issue by the 15th major release, but in general it's ok. We implemented a workaround.

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