Responding to community questions on social media isn't just a marketing task. Every question should be answered by the employee that is responsible for that part of the business. Your employees will be exposed to direct feedback about their work and your community will always get the best possible response. This is also the best way to ensure that you're building a product that people actually want. See how we achieved this with Respondo [1].
We're just getting started and we'd love to hear your feedback! [2]
Support for RBAC for GitLab Managed Apps was added in 11.4 [1]. You can also connect any Kubernetes cluster hosted anywhere - see the docs on that [2].
What problems are you hitting when installing GitLab on Kubernetes? You can always open an issue about it so it can be prioritized for fixing.
Please also note that you don't have to install GitLab itself on Kubernetes in order to add a Kubernetes cluster to your projects or groups. We updated the docs yesterday to prevent confusion about this https://gitlab.com/charts/gitlab/merge_requests/599/diffs
I genuinely feel this is not the case. GitLab is so much more - it encompasses the full DevOps Lifecycle in a single application. If you haven't checked out our homepage recently, it might be interesting for you to rediscover what GitLab offers - https://about.gitlab.com/
Full disclosure: I work for GitLab, but what I stated above has nothing to do with the fact, it's how I personally see GitLab as a product.
> GitLab is so much more - it encompasses the full DevOps Lifecycle in a single application
That's what I meant by "integrated services already possible with Github". I guess you are familiar with Github Marketplace.
I don't mean to offend GitLab, it's a great service, I just mean that it could be much more if it worked on low level things too, like storage of issues as git objects, or federated instances. These are hard problems that won't make GitLab easy sell to a manager but definitely interesting things that would get developers attention.
We have some low-level stuff on our roadmap (e.g. federated Merge Requests [1], federated GitLab instances [2], cross-platform mentions [3] - i.e. mentioning GitHub users). These didn't get prioritized yet, but it's only a matter of time. We have limited resources so we have to prioritize and scope out releases in a such a way that it advances both our vision and satisfies customer requests.
A really interesting low-level component that we created and use in production is gitaly [4] (which is a git RPC component that aims to completely remove GitLab's dependency on NFS for repository access - and replace it with gitaly itself).
We're working on making GitLab as fast as possible. We have a list of all ongoing efforts to improve performance of GitLab (the product) at [1]. There's also a list of ongoing efforts for improving performance and availability of GitLab.com specifically [2] (performance) and [3] (availability).
As for the differences compared to being on Azure. We don't have any definitive results right now. We'll have to wait for Monday so we can get more performance data. Most likely, we'll have a better image if and how performance changed in the middle of next week. That being said, we did observe an improvement in p95 response time for our web and api nodes - it's a roughly 30% to 40% reduction. We're working on a public monitoring page so you and the community can browse through these metrics at your own leisure.
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With regards to the Education program - it's now in full swing and available to everyone. You can apply via [4]. We sent out an automated email to let people know it was still in preparation some time ago. It should have been followed up with an email stating that it's fully functional too. Not sure why the university you work at didn't get the second one. Let me know if there's any holdups with your application after you apply through the linked form.
Oh yes, I’m definitely aware of your guys hard work on increasing performance, and it definitely hasn’t gone unnoticed/unappreciated. I’ve been using gitlab for a couple years now (drew me in with free private repos, and now have happily locked in with all the CI/devops tooling stuff, having that all in one place is what I love about gitlab) , and the difference between the performance now vs two or so years ago is incredible (that’s even with all the features that have been added since). I just wanted to express my only complaint I have had/frequently see, which as of recently has hardly ever been an issue. Also, really thankful it’s open source, as I find myself looking through the repo fairly often to see how you guys handle things in such a large app, as I’m the sole developer on an ever growing Rails app, gitlab’s code has been one of my gotos for ideas/seeing how something could be done. Hoping eventually I’ll get familiar with it enough that I’ll be able to make some contributions to those performance improvements instead of just complaining online about it ;).
> With regards to the Education program - it's now in full swing and available to everyone.
Awesome to hear! The group that maintains the gitlab instance is just a few volunteers that meet once/twice a month to work on maintenance/upgrades, and the update I got from them about the education license being on hold was ~2-3 weeks ago, however this month’s meeting was cancelled for whatever reason, so they likely have gotten the update that it’s now available, and just haven’t had the chance to work on getting it setup yet. But, I’ll ask them Monday, and send them the link if they aren’t already aware. Can’t wait to finally get to use some of those awesome ultimate features at work.
Appreciate the response! Always like seeing you guys pop in to these threads with some extra tidbits/insights/help.
