The move to a hamburger menu saw significant outcry, and was followed by one of the more popular tickets I've ever seen on GitLab asking for the ability to restore the menu pin feature. Every complaint and criticism was basically replied with "Nah, we're keeping it.", because the new hamburger menu had gone through "design testing".
If you're looking to improve UI/UX, the design team should look through those tickets and learn how to listen when so many users are speaking up against a redesign.
Rest assured, that we are hard at work at this (see for more information https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794). Even better, if I am correct, there will be a new navigation concept (first alpha iteration) released in 9.4! This will be hidden in a feature flag, which will be accessible from your personal settings.
In the coming months (and thus releases, every 22nd!) we will continue to improve upon this concept, to eventually enable it by default for everyone to enjoy.
We know that the shortcomings of the hamburger icon are suboptimal, but also know that reverting is not always the correct choice. With the new navigation concept we focus on getting a clear distinction between global and contextual navigation. We did proper UX testing to be able to clear out multiple bumps in the road/implementation and are pretty stoked about finally getting it in!
Again check for more information this issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794. The scope of revising navigation is pretty far reaching and has been on the minds of almost everyone on gitlab!
Note that colors, functionality and any specifics can change throughout the process of implementing over the coming months :)
Also, companies I've worked at in the past (when sufficiently big) have had "playground" AWS accounts that had a fixed cost for daily all-you-can-use resources. I'd like to think that if you're big enough to think you need >2/3 supporting services to come up with your app, maybe you already have enough traction for that kind of cloud playground account?
I can only speak definitively for myself, but most apps I have built are generally 1 app instance, 1 DB and _maybe_ 1 service for caching. Thinking about how to make these easier to spin up (which includes making sure it's easy for me to make a close-to-production environment as quick as possible), has benefited me, despite initial pain.
Also, if cost is the angle, there are tens of things companies could do, but don't that could bring down cost. Outside of "have more performance-minded developers", "add more computers" is often the cheapest option a company has as far as increasing performance (hence the whole rise of horizontal scalability right?).
I agree that Gitlab should focus on user experience (I'm not sure what you were referring to by "Git hosting"), but I am happy that they've decided to add this CI/CD (and issue boards, and CI), in ONE place.
The 'review-app' pattern is interesting but doesn't scale for more complicated apps. You'd need to create a 'review cluster' for every branch which quickly becomes untenable. It's usually not lack of automation but cost driving down the number of non-prod environments.
I'm actually a big fan of Gitlab but they should probably focus on user experience and Git hosting and let the other sizable number of products/projects which already exist focus on deployment. Spinnaker, for example, is probably what I'd recommend companies adopt for CD if they're looking to go in that direction.