Thanks for using Jenkins for close to 10 years and sorry to see you move on, but I just want to correct the record here because I don't think the time line of events and your description are accurate.
First, pipeline stages have never been restartable in Jenkins from the beginning of Jenkins Pipeline. It wasn't as if we started with restartable stage and decided to close-source it at one point. From the very beginning, it was a feature we exclusively developed for CloudBees products.
From time to time, we do move some features from products to Jenkins. As somebody later in the thread pointed out, in JENKINS-45455 we are doing just that. Another example of this from early days is the folders feature, which is now used by many.
Any company building enterprise products on top of OSS will likely keep some features in products. And for any given person, only some of those features are likely useful. So while I understand the frustration of "that feature should be in OSS" or "I should be able to just get this one thing for a small price", I don't think there's anything inherently bad about these practices.
As for Pipeline stage view, it is still available today, and IIRC it is also still a part of Jenkins 2 default experience. Now, you are right that, as a contributor of the project, CloudBees is focused on pushing Blue Ocean forward. We think Blue Ocean solves the problem of pipeline result comprehension a lot better, and we'd rather make one solution better as opposed to work on two separate things that solves the same problem simultaneously. That is not to block other people from carrying the pipeline stage view forward, though, if anyone is willing.
I hope that helps,
Feel free to correct me, here is my take on it.
You are right the restarting in the declarative was not open, then closed. But I didn't say that, I said not having it was a dick move.
My point is a Stage is just an alias for a Job (or multiple) for the regular Joe who doesn't work on Jenkins code. That was always restartable at any time in my pipelines (Delivery Pipeline Plugin, Build Pipeline plugin, etc...). So when we started writing the old and new pipelines as code we assumed the feature would be the same, while learning the new DSL at the time it was not clear that it was not, at least to us. Lot's of people thought the same the link below is an example of it. This was 2016 if I am not mistaken, it's now open source and congratulations for changing that as I said when it was pointed out to me, but I am not following the topic anymore.
I have no problem with the business, as I said I vouched for it, and in the end they brought the licenses. My problem was, the main reason to buy it was not support or something juicy like Cloudbees cluster management features, It was that we wanted restarts.
Is it bad? Absolutely not. But it's not something that made me feel happy. I just think it was not a thing I could easily communicate with the people making the decisions, was like punishing engineers for a problem that they can't solve, give managers a reason to buy it, Cluster management is a nice one, Automatic backups another, having miserable engineers is a terrible one.
About Stage view, I was frustrated from training support and others to use it on a complex pipeline just to see a new tool take over and from what I remember it was a very fast switch. There was no gain in changing to Blue Ocean at the time, as our restarts where not working on it. So we had one UI that worked without support and another that didn't with it. Again I am not following it the topic anymore, so this might be fixed by now.
I hope they improve their ways, it's a nice tool and I invested a lot of my time into it, but right now GoCD is my default option from now on.
I'm the founder/CEO of Codeship and we got acquired by CloudBees earlier this year. And I want to make sure that Jenkins + all CloudBees products get better :)
Last year I was in contact with the Jenkins team and had a couple of meetings to discuss the things mentioned above and some more.
The developers where very nice and interested, I know they were doing their best but the problem was my problems where not top priority, and I saw some problems solved over the months but I completely lost my will to help when blue ocean started and Stage view was abandoned, the super dick move of restarting stages as well.
It was not a small deployment mind you, the system was a critical one (payments) with multiple sites and all the works, not a small license as well, I left that company but before leaving we were already migrating away.
We had a complete pipeline dependent on it, we were an early adopter of the whole JenkinsFile (A developer myself I pushed hard for it) and stage view even without being awesome was already part of our way of working. We wanted more features that I was already discussing and bugs fixed, out of the blue they change to a completely different thing that was pretty but didn't solve any of my old problems, and that will have it's own problems and was/is not even close to complete.
I just feel I wasted my time, I don't plan to make that mistake again.
But I hope Jenkins X can improve on the past mistakes and become a contender again.
Sorry to hear about those issues. I shared your feedback with a couple of people, and we will work hard on being more mindful when making such changes going forward.
GoCD is a super simple CD platform (from user/developer point of view), easy to learn and with little possibility to snowflake it, with a Fan in dependency resolution that works nice.
The UI is not awesome but does the tricky for support teams and others.
BTW I have no association to any of the CD/CI companies I just like to work on this topic.
With regards to your question: I agree with user kerny.
Stop packing stuff on top.
What I want from Gitlab is to use it to manage my repos. If you improve that aspect (which is already fine though IMO), you'll make me happier.
If you improve Gitlab integration with other CI tools, you'll make me happier.
If you improve your CI solution (which I found lacking when I evaluated it 1.5 years ago -- no idea how it's now), I still won't use it -- I explicitly don't want to rely on one, integrated solution.
In my experience, such integrated solutions are fine for a while, until they aren't. My use cases tend to expand to things the integrated solution doesn't provide, and them I'm stuck.
Do one thing, and do it well. Doing yet more things detracts from Gitlab's appeal. Personally, I wouldn't mind you utterly removing Gitlab's CI tool (I know, not gonna happen, and that's fine -- just saying).
And GitLab Omnibus also does one thing. (It bundles those.)
Making it more configurable (as in makeing more features disable-able) would be nice though.
We think there is a lot of value in a single application for the complete DevOps lifecycle https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/11/from-dev-to-devops/ and we'll continue to build that in 2018.
We'll also keep improving the existing parts of GitLab, such as the managing of repo's https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#code-review
We want to play nice with other CI tools and for example have great support for Jenkins https://about.gitlab.com/features/jenkins/
If you didn't use our CI since 1.5 years give it a shot, it is very good https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/#gitlab-ci-is-a-lead...
We don't want you to get suck with an integrated solution that is bad. We'll make sure that we'll keep improving every aspect of GitLab together with the wider community (100+ contributions in the last month). And if you want to use GitLab with something else you're welcome to https://about.gitlab.com/features/github/
And as a GitLab user you can turn off the things you don't want under project settings https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/#sharing-an...
Please let us know if there is anything we should add there.
My primary concern is that instead of polishing the features that have already been released, the platform is trying to do too many new things. Some of that stuff is cool (k8s monitoring integration, though EEP is too expensive for me, and my Grafana dashboard does basically the same thing), while some of it seems a bit bloated (SAST/DAST for example, which was a few lines of code to implement ourself).
I really want the core Github replacement use-case to be as ergonomic as Github is. And the CI/CD piece is also great, but still has plenty of rough edges (e.g. Environments are a great feature, but I still can't clean up stale ones, which makes the environment list basically useless).
My experience with support has been a bit lackluster; e.g. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897644.
General reliability in CI/CD is not great; I'd say something like 0.25-0.5% of my build jobs fail from intermittent infrastructure failures (mostly gitlab runner/API issues from what I can tell), which wasn't a problem when I was using Jenkins.
Ops is still a significant concern; site reliability has improved in the last year, but that's not saying a lot; it's still a fairly frequent occurrence to get errors during/after a deploy. I'm not sure if this problem would be better or worse if I self-hosted, as I don't know how hard it is to run a GL instance (seems like it's hard, given how often the gitlab.com site has issues).
Performance has also improved in the last year, but the site is still on the slow side (e.g. compared to contenders like gitea).
Oh, and the pricing model is a bit broken -- all of the other SaaS platforms that I use let me pay monthly (at a higher rate); when I was evaluating paying for gitlab.com vs. doing self-hosted EE, I really wanted to pay for my team to use the hosted offering for a few months to see how things went, but I wasn't prepared to lock in for a year, so I didn't end up trying out the hosted paid offering.
None of these points in isolation is enough to make me leave the platform and go back to Jenkins, but they are enough to make me pay close attention to the alternatives.
Regarding polish we're improving existing features all the time, we're very close to a big refactor of the merge request view.
Regarding CI/CD environment deletion I can find it in the API https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/environments.html#delete-an-e... but I'm not sure about the interface.
Support has had trouble scaling, we just hired a director to make sure we get on track, sorry about that.
Having you builds fail intermittently is bad, this should be a problem only on GitLab.com Reliability of that is not where it should be and we're taking drastic actions to improve it. If anyone reading this is up for the challenge please see https://jobs.lever.co/gitlab/a9ec2996-b7b6-4d87-aed0-1fc2ce3...
Regarding the yearly pricing this is a tradeoff we made, see point 7 of https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/pricing/#when-is-a... I thought we offered a 30 day money back guarantee but I can't find it onhttps://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ so I'll ask product marketing what is up with that.
Environments currently can't be deleted from the UI. We have an issue open about it at - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25388
The issue gained a lot of traction. It's scheduled for 11.1.
Could you elaborate on that please?
bandit-check:
# This check runs Openstack Bandit, a Python static analysis tool that checks for
security issues.
stage: unit-test
script:
- bandit -r -x 'tests,test_,/migrations/,./src/' -c bandit-config.yaml -ll ."
Of course there's also some window dressing to display the errors on the main MR, instead of having to dig into a step failure, but that doesn't make a meaningful difference to me.
(This feature could well have moved on since it was first implemented, that was the only time I dug into it).
I have used and vouched for Jenkins in several companies and some decent sized licenses were bought mainly because of my input.
But to me, Cloudbees has done a major dick move making the stages not restartable in Jenkins 2.0, among other things. E.g: Dropping stage view out of nowhere and focusing only in Blue Ocean. I complained about in the channels that I had at the time and the response was, it's going to be unsupported from now on.
It's a super squechy thing to have such a useful feature bundled with a bunch of support and useless stuff that I don't care, and then charge me per node. I am migrating away from Jenkins into GoCD after close to 10 years using it, and don't get me wrong I don't feel happy doing this, but it's hard to justify it.
Fortunately the future looks bright, there are several interesting solutions available, Argo is super interesting to me, looking forward for Argo CD!