Don't trust their feature list, they often "forget" to use it themselves. Many of those features are there to tick the box and daze executives, but are barely usable in practice.
It took them a year to start supporting Kubernetes clusters with RBAC, they didn't use autodevops for their own releases, even for simple components, nor any kubernetes integration, monitoring, feature flags, Geo, backup procedure. Who in the right mind is going to enable Web Application Firewall feature, when rules exceptions cannot be configured?
Somewhere in comments here will be reply from Gitlab employee, saying that dogfooding is something they are constantly working on, it doesn't matter. What they should be doing is to update documentation pages with feature maturity level and have a block of links to most popular bugs related to the feature, so that poor devops engineers don't have to rediscover all the pain and come prepared.
Just to be clear, Gitlab is an awesome tool, it is just not as awesome as their marketing wants us to believe.
To ensure we meet your expectations I want to state that we're continuously working on dogfooding, you can track our progress in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues?label_name=Dog...
"What they should be doing is to update documentation pages with feature maturity level and have a block of links to most popular bugs related to the feature"
That is a great idea and I wonder if https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/ meets your expectations. We recently update the criteria for viable and complete to incorporate dogfooding:
- Viable: Significant use at GitLab the company.
- Complete: GitLab the company dogfoods it exclusively.
And thanks for calling us an awesome tool. Hope you don't mind the tongue-in-cheek response at the top of my comment :)
GitLab had been great for us, though we've had issues around their educational institutions license.. so we can't use a lot of the fancy features... But I've enjoyed ops work more on GitLab than GitHub or Jenkins.
We use gitlab at work and it has been great, though we have really great sysadmins so maybe my perception is a bit skewed.
That being said Gitlab's UI is still commits a lot of UI complications that makes it inferior to github for managing libre projects.
I really wish gitlab would have a stronger push to contests the open-source space but it seems that they have pretty much given up already and focus for enterprise instead. :|
You're right that GitLab is trying to differentiate itself as the best place to scale software, and so it feels like its focus is on enterprises. That's where the open source strategy also currently aligns. GitLab is making the best platform to help open source projects thrive at scale.
I'm the new Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab and was recently hired to build out our GitLab for Open Source program (https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/). This program allows open source projects to use GitLab's top tiers for free, and it provides assistance to large open source organizations throughout their migrations. We are providing open source projects with GitLab’s top-of-the-line features, that enterprises are using, to help them along their own journey.
As I mentioned, GitHub is doing a lot of great things, and I think that GitLab used to be perceived as merely playing a game of catch up. This is no longer where we are today. We're fast at iterating on our product and are blazing ahead on creating a platform that enables cross-functional team collaboration, and industry-standard features for the full software development lifecycle. We're working on a similar strategy with our open source offering -- so that we're not playing catch up, but are instead defining a new standard.
As an open-core company, we have an open roadmap for our product and for everything else we do. If you have ideas for our community relations team (I'm part of this team), we welcome your feedback! You can reach us via our forum: forum.gitlab.com, and via [email protected]. You can also read all about what we do and how we work here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
Currently we are using ModSecurity for our Web Application Firewall and rather than duplicating their documentation, we refer our users to ModSecurity's documentation for rule configuration. Rule exceptions with GitLab's WAF are possible as documented on the ModSecurity website: https://www.modsecurity.org/CRS/Documentation/exceptions.htm...
It is also worth noting that we are in the process of designing a more refined, UI-based policy management experience. While this policy management experience is starting with support for Cilium Network Policies only, we plan to eventually add support for WAF rules as well. We would love to get input or feedback you have on the direction we are headed with our policy management interface at https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3403
I think we can stop recommending License and Contributors since GitLab is mostly used for closed source software. The templates will still be there but just not suggested until you started to create a new file.
And you should be able to disable everything but the repo if you want to. And of course you can disable the repo as well if you just want the planning features for example.
e.g. thumbs up/down, report abuse etc.
BYW There is also a reply in this thread from a GitLab UX team-member who responds to a comment about the thumbs up/down and report abuse buttons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23606854
You can do it in Settings > General > "Visibility, project features, permissions"
I am using Gitlab Next and Kubernetes, Security & Compliance, Operations, Analytics, Members are not removable options.
Being able to wholesale disable features across the install would be a good first step.
Mostly I only use the Git, CI, Readme rendering, Docker registry and that's about it. Everything else just gets in the way and makes the interface harder to navigate.
I've never seen designers use full-on version control, so this is super interesting to me. Do you consider yourself more of a technical person?
But if I have a Graphic Design repo it emphasises Kubernetes, Packages and Security features that have zero relevance. And there is no way to disable them.
And that on every single repo it places these Add License/Contributors etc buttons front and centre even though for 99% of internal projects they serve no purpose.
Every release Gitlab seriously needs to step back and think about how to simplify the interface. Because it's starting to get a bit ridiculous.