Jaguar Land Rover, BI Worldwide share GitLab migration pros and cons
Enterprise DevOps pros that switched to GitLab from GitHub and Atlassian tools share their experiences as Microsoft refugees eye GitHub competitors post acquisition.
Microsoft's proposed acquisition of popular code repository vendor GitHub also thrust competitor GitLab into the spotlight. A quarter-million customers tried to move code repositories from GitHub to GitLab last week in the wake of the Microsoft news, a surge that crashed the SaaS version of GitLab.
Enterprises with larger, more complex code repositories will need more than a few days to weigh the risks of the Microsoft acquisition and evaluate alternatives to GitHub. However, they were preceded by other enterprise GitLab converts who shared their experience with GitLab migration pros and cons.
BI Worldwide, an employee engagement software company in Minneapolis, considered a GitLab migration when price changes to CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise software drove a sevenfold increase in the company's licensing costs for both CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise and GitHub Enterprise.
GitLab offers built-in DevOps pipeline tools with its code repositories in both SaaS and self-hosted form. BI Worldwide found it could replace both GitHub Enterprise and CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise with GitLab for less cost, and made the switch in late 2017.
"GitLab offered better functionality over GitHub Enterprise because we don't have to do the extra work to create web hooks between the code repository and CI/CD pipelines, and its CI/CD tools are comparable to CloudBees," said Adam Dehnel, product architect at BI Worldwide.
GitLab's tools include both code version control and app delivery pipelines.
Jaguar Land Rover-GitLab fans challenge Atlassian incumbents
Automobile manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover, based in London, also uses self-hosted GitLab among the engineering teams responsible for its in-vehicle infotainment systems. A small team of three developers in a company outpost in Portland, Ore., began with GitLab's free SaaS tool in 2016, though the company at large uses Atlassian's Bitbucket and Bamboo tools.
As of May 2018, about a thousand developers in Jaguar Land Rover's infotainment division use GitLab, and one of the original Portland developers to champion GitLab now hopes to see it rolled out across the company.
Sometimes vendors ... get involved with other parts of the software development lifecycle that aren't their core business, and customers get sold an entire package that they don't necessarily want.
Chris Hillhead of systems engineering, Jaguar Land Rover's infotainment systems
"Atlassian's software is very good for managing parent-child relationships [between objects] and collaboration with JIRA," said Chris Hill, head of systems engineering for Jaguar Land Rover's infotainment systems. "But sometimes vendors can start to get involved with other parts of the software development lifecycle that aren't their core business, and customers get sold an entire package that they don't necessarily want."
A comparison between tools such as GitLab and Bitbucket and Bamboo largely comes down to personal preference rather than technical feature gaps, but Hill said he finds GitLab more accessible to both developers and product managers.
"We can give developers self-service capabilities so they don't have to chew up another engineer's time to make merge requests," Hill said. "We can also use in-browser editing for people who don't understand code, and run tutorials with pipelines and rundeck-style automation jobs for marketing people."
Jaguar Land Rover's DevOps teams use GitLab's collaborative comment-based workflow, where teams can discuss issues next to the exact line of code in question.
"That cuts down on noise and 'fake news' about what the software does and doesn't do," Hill said. "You can make a comment right where the truth exists in the code."
GitLab offers automated continuous integration testing of its own and plugs in to third-party test automation tools. Continuous integration testing inside GitLab and with third-party tools is coordinated by the GitLab Runner daemon. Runner will be instrumental to deliver more frequent software updates over the air to in-car infotainment systems that use a third-party service provider called Redbend, which will mean Jaguar Land Rover vehicle owners will get automatic updates to infotainment systems without the need to go to a dealership for installation. This capability will be introduced with the new Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV in July 2018.
Balancing GitLab migration pros and cons
BI Worldwide and Jaguar Land Rover both use the self-hosted version of GitLab's software, which means they escaped the issues SaaS customers suffered with crashes during the Microsoft GitHub exodus. They also avoided a disastrous outage that included data loss for GitLab SaaS customers in early 2017.
Still, their GitLab migrations have come with downsides. BI Worldwide jumped through hoops to get GitLab's software to work with AWS Elastic File System (EFS), only to endure months of painful conversion from EFS to Elastic Block Store (EBS), which the company just completed.
GitLab never promised that its software would work well with EFS, and part of the issue stemmed from the way AWS handles EFS burst credits for performance. But about three times a day, response time from AWS EFS in the GitLab environment would shoot up from an average of five to eight milliseconds to spikes as high as 900 milliseconds, Dehnel said.
"EBS is quite a bit better, but we had to get an NFS server setup attached to EBS and work out redundancy for it, then do a gross rsync project to get 230 GB of data moved over, then change the mount points on our Rancher [Kubernetes] cluster," Dehnel said. "The version control system is so critical, so things like that are not taken lightly, especially as we also rely on [GitLab] for CI/CD."
GitLab is working with AWS to address the issues with its product on EFS, a company spokesperson said. For now, its documentation recommends against deployment with EFS, and the company suggests users consider deployments of GitLab to Kubernetes clusters instead.
