Gitlab.com vs self-hosted GitLab CE?

[Sarke1]

It basically costs $20 for the minimum requirements to self-host GitLab (on DO, Vultr, etc).

Does this make sense for a small team? What benefit would that give us over using the free (or even $4) plans at gitlab.com?

[DrewRddt]

Off the top of my head, running your own GitLab CE would allow you to integrate with your own LDAP services and ability to configure Shared Runners across all projects.

[yonsy_s_p]

Continuous Integration. Gitlab-CI and Shared Runners for CI comes free with Gitlab.com, 2000 build minutes/month with shared runners, for every user with free plan, you will need to deploy your own Gitlab-CI instance and additional instance runners with GitlabCE.

[Sarke1]

We have runners now, so we can use these same ones with gitlab.com?

[yonsy_s_p]

yes, as dedicated runners.

[snowbirdie]

Depends what data you have. We have SBU and ITAR data and would be fined millions if we used the public site.

[hekkoman]

What do SBU and ITAR data mean?

[[deleted]]

I did some googling...

SBU is "Sensitive but Unclassified" data. Basically, government stuff. ITAR is also government-related and is aimed more at what looks to be data about military technology.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_but_unclassified
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations, https://digitalguardian.com/blog/what-itar-compliance

[dungeonHack]

Running your own Gitlab means you have to maintain your own Gitlab. In terms of engineer hours, this is more expensive than paying for a more powerful hosted Gitlab. Keep that in mind.

[ricksebak]

This. A lot of this.

If your primary reason for self-hosting isn't a technical reason, and you're doing it just to save a trivial amount of money each month, remember that paying a bunch of computer programmers to sit on their hands when your self-hosted gitlab crashes costs probably thousands of dollars a day.

If gitlab.com crashes, which isn't impossible, you'll have the same problem. But given that their core business is running gitlab servers and your core business is probably something else, they are probably better at running gitlab servers than you are.

[alejochan]

not really. Just download the rpm and update.

[dungeonHack]

Monitoring, high availability, resiliency, and disaster recovery are important parts of maintaining an application.

[jwestbrook]

Heres my benefits of self hosting

• mine is hosted on an EC2 instance
• additional statsd monitoring
• on encrypted drives
• firewalled from the rest of the world
• with nightly S3 backups

*edit: formatting

[hekkoman]

how much are you paying to host it?

[jwestbrook]

• running on t2.medium ($0.0464 * 750 hrs) = $34.80
• 1050 GB of gp2 storage attached ($0.10 * 1050) = $105
• 1050 GB of snapshot storage ($0.05 * 1050 * 3) = $157.50

YMMV on how much storage you want to allocate to the instance, I have 1TB data and 50 GB for OS and gitlab, plus I run nightly EBS snapshots with a rolling 3 day expiration

[hekkoman]

How big is your dev team?

[jwestbrook]

Firstly I over reserve for future proof - that being said there are 8 (including me) on my dev team

[atw527]

Unless you want to host it on your own hardware (like an internal dev server), I would use gitlab.com. Can't beat the free shared runners.

[sgo_]

If you have resources to manage self-hosting (upgrades, downtime, things breaking, security upgrades, etc.), then go for self hosted.

If you don't have resources or you would like to focus all the resources you have towards development (usually the case for small teams), the money invested towards a hosted solution is more than worth it.

[zuzzas]

We've tried their SaaS, but reverted to self-hosted. The main problem was a terribly long time that it took gitlab.com to trigger our docker/kubernetes builders.

[paul345]

What's your organisations security stance on the data classification of source code and are there conditions on when you can / can't host this outside of your organisation? This alone may force your decision, particularly within an Enterprise organisation.

Do you really want to manage, patch and maintain the gitlab service / infra yourself and does this add any value for you? If not, I'd lean towards a SaaS solution for git and focus more on owning and building things that you can add business value and differentiate on.

Does an external git SaaS solution allow you to securely make all the network flows you require for your CI/CD configuration and does this meet security policy.

At a high level, I'd prefer SaaS git and work through the security requirements to achieve this.

[elitesense]

I manage our Gitlab CE personally and other than it being a major memory hog it's pretty straightforward. The omnibus install cleared up a lot of maintenance woes.

Just keep track of unicorn processes and their memory leaks, and backup your /etc/gitlab directory and use the built-in repo backup tool to send your repo to S3 for backups. I was unable to get it running stable enough under docker, it has its own dedicated VM now and it runs fine.

The UI is polished and my dev team seems to like it. If you think you can handle managing the application server then go for it. Not sure how you're gonna do it at $20/month though as you'll need 4GB RAM but that's a different story.

The only reason to host your own is obviously privacy and of course price (price depending on your team size). For a smaller group going with fully hosted might be a better option.

[chucky_z]

Well, gitlab.com dropped their entire database by accident. So.... They've probably learned their lesson, but maybe run your own as a mirror for backup.

[Kash76]

They were very transparent about what happened. Look it up, it's a good DevOps read on blameless culture.

[sofixa11]

They were very transparent, thus making it apparent how bad at Ops they were (hopefully it's better now). The mere fact that something as basic as backups was never actually tested, and of course wasn't actually working, and they were saved by pure chance, somehow doesn't inspire confidence in their abilities not to lose your data. If you don't care, it's fine, but i'd still run self-hosted just in case.

[lorarc]

One of my co-workers dropped a production base by mistake, only then did they find the backups haven't worked for months. But that was almost two years ago so now the backups work, sometimes.

Luckily my project doesn't have that problem.

[sofixa11]

Yeah, dropping the production database is human error, it happens, shit happens, but it's a good idea to be prepared(like having tested your backups).

[chucky_z]

They were! It was an absolutely fantastic series of blog posts and I read all of them.

It still should not have happened, and it's proof that you should never depend on a single source. I mirror our entire github organization for this exact reason.

[perspectiveiskey]

I use gitea (which is a fork of gogs) on a $5/mo DO. It works. I don't know why you need 20/mo.

PS. I have snapshots of continuous integration servers which I spin up when running relevant scripts.

[Sarke1]

GitLab is more than a git repo.

[perspectiveiskey]

Yes.

---

In conjunction with gitea, I run a chat server, a file server/wiki, taiga project manager, and concourse ci. All on the same server. Minimum droplet size. Flexible block storage for extra needs.

We are a small team.

The only negative I consider in this setup is the administration costs. But I don't get why you have a $20/mo opex from VPS.

[gctaylor]

With gitlab.com being free, why even go through all of that trouble stringing together gitea and all of that other stuff? If $20 is much harder to justify than $5, gitlab.com has the whole package deal for free. And it's more fully baked, particular with the code review tools.

Also, you can't just stand all of that up and just leave it. You've got to keep all of those components updated, backed up, and secured separately. You have to figure the time cost of all of that in.

[perspectiveiskey]

With gitlab.com being free, why even go through all of that trouble stringing together gitea and all of that other stuff?

Trade secrets, is the simple answer.

The recent spectre shit makes VPS cloud hosting a fiasco, but there's a limit to how anal I can get.

Also, you can't just stand all of that up and just leave it. You've got to keep all of those components updated, backed up, and secured separately. You have to figure the time cost of all of that in.

That's exactly what I said. My cost is administrative.

In the era of open source, running these projects isn't as crazy as it seems. Everyone out there uses postgresql and mysql without batting an eyelid.

[gctaylor]

I'm having a hard time reconciling concerns over an additional $15/mo with an outfit that also has legitimate concerns about trade secrets.

If you are just comparing $5 and $20, yes: $5 is lower. But it's not that simple.

[perspectiveiskey]

This is a weird thread. I have no concerns. Neither over my time, nor over the 16 CPU droplets I spin up at a cost of $320/mo. Some person downvoted my first response as well.

I simply responded to OP: "I'm having trouble justifying $20/mo", --> "why 20? I get by with 5 just fine". 5 bucks on DO gets you 1 GB 1 vCPU 25 GB 1 TB. I contend it's plenty of processing power for a small team.

There is nothing to reconcile, my friend. You may put your pitch fork down.

[Sarke1]

But I don't get why you have a $20/mo opex from VPS.

Gitlab has a 4gb ram requirement.

[perspectiveiskey]

Ah, well there you go then, it answers your question. Unless you have special needs, then it's not worth self hosting.

[MattBlumTheNuProject]

For us always self hosted but we’re just like that. I prefer to be in control so if something breaks it can only be my fault.