The constant issues GitLab has had with updates/deployments echoes back to a common thread that many people feel about software in general, which is that we have needleslly over-complicated things, making things brittle.

Wether it's GitLab's stack that is brittle, or that the team doesn't have experience dealing with growing pains, it doesn't change the point.

The parent commenter is saying (or rather, insinuating) that GitLab's outage is symptomatic of a broader problem in the software industry, vis á vis unnecessary complexity.

I think it was worded a bit harshly, but there's a kernel of truth there. I don't mean to pile onto GitLab in particular, but take a look at this open proposal for hardware upgrades at GitLab in late 2016: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/11/proposed-server-purchase.... I don't think I can do a better job of explaining what's wrong with that proposal than this thread, from the ensuing HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153860.

Our industry is plagued with architecture decisions that pile layers and layers of complexity onto otherwise straightforward technical problems in pursuit of scalable abstraction. Even companies that legitimately have to think about "scale" choose architectures which technically impressive but brittle in practice.

Parent has never shipped an N + 1 from their armchair. It's amazing, really.

This issue is different, but gitlab.com usually has poor availability which I'm sure it's caused in part by technical decisions they made.

Is it? There are plenty of Rails sites, Basecamp included, that have pretty high uptime. GitHub is also based on Rails, and while it could be better, it is substantially more stable than GitLab IMO.