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Comment by nicce | Hacker News Reader

> They're pushing SaaS over on-prem

You can perfectly run, identical, self-hosted version of GitHub on premise? Maybe sales is focusing SaaS, but otherwise, there isn't difference?

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I run an on-prem GitHub server. New features come 6-18+ months behind Cloud for the most part, our reps are always trying to get us to move to Cloud, and new features are often broken for weeks/months even after being released for on-prem.

I might be out of my element, but if your trying to run on prem anyway, why not just go full open source and self host?

Subjective take: GH & GL are equally bad when it comes to bundled enterprise features, so the differentiator is going to be individual dev features & UX/DX. GH is much better at the latter - CICD might've been a differentiator in the past for GL but even before Actions a lot of companies were pretty happy going 3P here.

I would assume they are running it for a company, in which if said user gets hit by a bus you want to be able to bring someone else in quickly that can run the operation.

We have looked at GitLab in the past, but I wasn't involved in that process. Generally though:

- Enterprise support is very important to us - Migrating thousands of repos and training hundreds of devs to use a new VCS is a huge and expensive task - We have custom integrations with GitHub that would need to be rewritten as well

Curious about your experience as I'm in a similar position (running ghe, want to stay on it, mgmt being sold on ghec) - I have other reasons for wanting to stay on ghe but my experience is recent features hit ghec first. Maybe that's a recent change in their release cycles?

GHES is a massive monolith running dozens (hundreds?) of services in Nomad, so it's not surprising to me that GH has a hard time supporting it and wants folks to move away from it.

I'm tired of slow, risky, late-night upgrades to the appliance. I'm tired of sending support bundles and being told to run a customized string of MySQL commands to resolve peculiar issues. I'm tired of checking the roadmap and telling folks "yes, they announced that feature, but it won't be available to us for at least 12 months." I'm tired of a feature eventually being in the GHES release notes, only for GitHub to have made a mistake and it not be available for another two versions.

We're moving to GHEC. I'm concerned about the semi-frequent outages there, but we're not running HA GHES so it has become a liability for us.

Mainly talking about sales, but also a lot of their newer enterprise-oriented new feature developments are either saas-first, or not (yet?) roadmappedb for on-prem.

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