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Every software system used at Gitlab
- durpkingOP 6y agoWhy is salesforce the center of attention?
- juped 6y agoBecause this is the Business Operations tech stack.
- sytse 6y agoCorrect! If someone is more interested in what GitLab itself consists of please see https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#component-diagram https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#com...
- threeseed 6y agoBecause it is the source of truth for all of your customers both current and future. And surely customers should be the centre of everyone's business.
- swah 6y agoLike OP, I'd love to understand better what Salesforce does (so well, it seems). Its a bit hard to imagine, just like SAP software (for me), since all your experience is on industries far from that world.
- edumucelli 6y agoIn their documentation Gitlab explains the usage they have of Salesforce, you may get a non-Gitlab specific view of it, for example: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/customer-success/using-salesforce-within-customer-success/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/customer-success/using-sal...
- echelon 6y agoHow much money do you wager that Salesforce license costs? I know there's the whole build-vs-buy debate, but with the cost of Salesforce, might it not be better to just stick everything in a database and throw a MySQL WYSIWYG tool like phpmyadmin in front in order to let non-engineers see the schema and build forms? I suppose if you're earning money hand over fist (or keep getting VC funds) then the cost of your Salesforce license doesn't matter. But I bet that hurts. And unlike a lot of the other software in use, Salesforce comes with steep lock-in.
- dtech 6y agoYou severely, severely, underestimate the complexity and business value of a CRM
- masonhensley 6y agoBeen there, done that. Agree with dtech. You also get to a point in hiring where the field of sales/ops people judge you & your maturity based on whether you use a commercial tool like Salesforce/HubSpot vs build your own. Can you imagine joining a tech org and they have a half baked phpadmin wysiwyg as a standin for github + code reviews? While yes, you could calculate out how much the subscription is vs development time to build a simple CRM, the maintenance & mental overload is righteously terrible. Better to spend that effort integrating your foos to your bars than building a sales crm.
- Bellamy 6y agoI was thinking the same. Nice vendor lock-in... I would love to know how much that costs yearly.
- transfire 6y agoGracious. That's quite a lot to manage.
- est31 6y agoDoesn't seem that much for Gitlab's size. And they are doing an effort to document it all and write it down instead of having it lie distributed in the minds of employees managing those services.
- rubayeet 6y agoSurprised to see Shopify in the list (used for marketing?).
- sytse 6y agoYes, our web store for swag.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoVery nice! Thank you for sharing, I wonder though, no fancy big-screen dashboard service in there? Do people not value that kind of thing?
- stedaniels 6y agoThey are a remote distributed team. I don't think their employees would value having to arrange their workspaces to accommodate a big screen set up high and at a distance from their workstation.
- rosywoozlechan 6y agoDashboards are nice to have even on remote teams I think. Anyone can put up the dashboard or make a dashboard for their own screens if they wanted to.
- uaas 6y agoNo, it’s just a BO stack
- troquerre 6y agoHow did GitLab track and create this diagram? Is there a service that does it automatically?
- threeseed 6y agoIt looks very much like OmniGraffle. And adding a new system is a pretty big deal at a large company so keeping it up to date isn't that difficult.
- troquerre 6y agoI meant how do they track the data? If they're just doing it manually that makes sense though it seems inefficient...
- FBISurveillance 6y agoSee https://app.diagrams.net/ https://app.diagrams.net/ -- you'll recognize the style.
- INTPenis 6y agoI use the same service, but I always knew it as draw.io. Never noticed when they started redirecting to this domain. This is very valuable to me as a Linux user in a Microsoft Platinum partner org because I can't run Visio natively.
- m463 6y agoso that seems to be: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
- sandGorgon 6y agocan such a diagram be generated using text markup ? i want to have this in revision control and then generate this in a static page (Nextjs or Gatsbyjs)
- stirner 6y ago
- daniel_iversen 6y agoFunny how they don't seem to really have any non-specialised tools to coordinate, manage and track work in a structured way across the company (like smaller team tools like Trello, or larger ones like Asana). The only cross company collaboration tool I saw on that diagram was Slack!
- Jarwain 6y agoMakes sense considering Gitlab _is_a cross-company collaboration tool; they eat their own dogfood. They have a whole set of features that compete directly with Trello/Asana
- threeseed 6y agoThey use Gitlab for that e.g. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/16653 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/16653 It has kanban, issues, epics, portfolios etc and they use comments for capturing knowledge e.g. similar to Confluence. You can watch how they use it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpvaqtJjXd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpvaqtJjXd0
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mr-karan 6y agoFor a company that makes and promotes FOSS, their tech stack sure is dominated by proprietary SASS vendor lock in solutions.
- threeseed 6y agoAs someone who has a B2B startup there is almost nothing in the open source space for Marketing/Sales Ops. And anything that does exist is really low quality. And it's because (a) most developers aren't exposed to non-Engineering parts of the company so they have no understanding of what problem to solve and (b) it is incredibly lucrative to build a proprietary SaaS solution.
- mr-karan 6y ago> there is almost nothing in the open source space for Marketing/Sales Ops There is https://erpnext.com/ https://erpnext.com/ which is completely FOSS built on Frappe framework. If anything, it is rather higher quality than most SASS solutions out there.
- bdcravens 6y agoIt's not entirely clear on their website, but I assume the full software is at https://github.com/frappe/erpnext https://github.com/frappe/erpnext, and they have a model similar to Sentry?
- PedroBatista 6y agoWord of advice: stay away from Erpnext, don't get fooled by the apparent "clean" interface. They might have some good conceptual ideas, but the implementation is horrific, their ops/delivery infrastructure a shitshow if even there's one, bugs all over the place and a product management that basically says yes to everything and finishes nothing. They are in part victims of their own success, but just look at their Github issues page.
- api 6y agoThat kind of software is not fun or sexy, so people have to be paid to write it. Same goes for accounting where there are few open source solutions. Boring as hell, and profitable.
- inopinatus 6y agoI’m wondering where the GL is, for when we outgrow Xero (which was about six months ago).
- snuxoll 6y agoLooks like they use NetSuite.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spondyl 6y agoThis isn't a recommendation or advice but if you're after a ledger that's larger than what Xero can offer to a big org, Netsuite seems to be what Gitlab uses and is ironically enough also what Xero uses. Unfortunately (and somewhat ironically?) we're too big to actually have Xero run on Xero
- inopinatus 6y agoIf you’d like some feedback, for us it’s less a volume issue and more a case of design limitations. We run subledgers per customer in our own code for clearing and settlement (we’re a two-sided network), and posting the rollups back to Xero sometimes runs into edge cases and limitations. Recognition timing is one pain point, another is API-driven reconciliation. What I’d struggle to give up is the ease of reporting. Xero’s report designer is right in my sweet spot for usability, flexibility, and domain-specific correctness, probably my favourite reporting tool in three decades of shaking down business software.
- spondyl 6y agoThanks for your feedback! While I don't work on the product (directly) or speak in any official capacity, I can definitely route your pain points and compliments to the respective teams internally :)
- spondyl 6y agoI don't know if any Gitlabbers are in the comments but I'd be interested to know: Is this basically your internal asset register open sourced? I suppose they're not particularly top secret but there could be a version that has some more sensitive data and this is a safe derivative for example. Similarly, such an asset register would likely have non-technical assets as well while this just seems to be tangible, technical things? I figure any large company with a risk management function will already have/need such a spreadsheet (or document), complete with some sort of data classifications to exist for auditing reasons so the interesting step is maintaining it out in the public. Kudos to Gitlab for having the culture to allow this sort of stuff :)
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoErr, what is an internal asset register?
- throwaway55554 6y agoAn asset register is how companies keep track of their assets. Any software license, computer, monitor, keyboard, copy machine, etc. the company claims as an asset is tracked in the register.
- ecnahc515 6y agoBasically an inventory system.
- coleca 6y agoYou'd be surprised the scale of companies that do not have this data. Or how many companies think they know where their data is but really don't. Especially with the proliferation of the SaaS services like you see in Gitlab's diagram. It's very easy for someone in the accounting or marketing department to sign up for something on their department's PCard and the IT / security / etc departments have no idea that company data is being kept there.
- sytse 6y agoOn the go to market side the registry is a Google Sheet. On the GitLab.com infrastructure side it is an app we made that isn’t integrated into GitLab. I’m seeing if we can move the sheet to the handbook and integrate the app into GitLab itself.
- teen 6y agoGitlab has been pretty great so far, but the code review tooling is so poor I think I need to look elsewhere. The pull request pages take forever to load, they can't handle pull requests with over 800 lines well at all. It will collapse files with over 100-200 lines of changes for seemingly no reason (hiding the comments within them). You can't ignore whitespace in diffs, and the comments disappear from the diff if they push new commits, you need to look at them in the overview again.
- malikolivier 6y agoI can relate. We use GitLab at our company. I still think the merge request UI is great. Its main problems are its slowness and the fact that files with a long diff are collapsed. As the full merge request is quite slow, I will usually open the diff of each commit one by one, then put review comments as a "per commit" basis.
- andr3 6y agoThanks for the comment. I've left a few replies in this thread already with more detail of work we have done, is currently in flight and work that is planned to keep improving the overall situation. As to the "per commit" review, we're working on something to make this navigation easier and easier and shipping it very soon. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/28596 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/28596 As to the collapsed, unfortunately if we loaded all diff lines expanded, the large changesets would make the browser unusable. We're working to lower the memory footprint and have better ways to deal with these large MRs. One example I can leave you with that we're trying to figure out a way to make this useful as an additional option, is this: * File by file mode of reviewing MRs, including the concept of "unread diffs": https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/516 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/516 We're aware of several of the pain points (we use GitLab to build GitLab ;) ), but if you have further feedback, please leave a comment in the issues and epics I've left here (or create new ones) and feel free to tag me @andr3. Thanks!
- jbaiter 6y agoYeah, this is definitely one of GitLab's weakest points at the moment and seriously impacts day-to-day work here as well. Simple features like ticking off files you've already reviewed are missing and even mid-sized MRs are a pain to review even on a beefy machine.
- hnick 6y agoMarketo eh? My wife mentioned wanting that in her small business after seeing a shiny video but I said the price is probably not going to be appropriate (some research seemed to support this). Does anyone have experience using it? I have mixed feelings about Adobe but don't know how much influence they wield.
- lowdose 6y agoIf she wants to sell to enterprise Marketo is a good option because of the deal size / volume. Google uses it for selling Google Cloud Platform. Otherwise Hubspot is probably a better idea.
- hnick 6y agoEnterprise is definitely not on the menu, and Hubspot or one of the similar alternatives does sound more around the level she'd need. I had some fun messing around with Mautic and it could be fun to learn, but I'm not sure how its future looks.
- adamfeldman 6y agoI’m not a Mautic user, but its future looks brighter now that they were acquired by the company behind Drupal. https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-acquires-mautic-to-deliver-first-ever-open-marketing-cloud https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/acqu...
- hnick 6y agoAcquisitions can go both ways and apparently the guy who invented and put a lot of sweat into it (dbhurley) has parted ways with the project. Also they used to produce a lot of media on using it, but it's all a couple of years old now. Maybe that means they got the fundamentals right back then but it does send a mixed message. I would love to try it, I've set it up and it seems to be working, but I'm just not sure what'll happen if something goes wrong (their forum moves a little slow too). I have no special knowledge, just a gut feel and outsider impressions.
- kbumsik 6y agoAs a complete remote company, I wonder if GitLab's business affected much by COVID-19?
- arnarbi 6y agoPeople still have kids who’d normally go to school, family to take care of, etc.
- toastal 6y agoAnd there's the mental health and anxiety issues a pandemic and quarantine bring
- nadiav1 6y agoOur e-team recently sent out a company wide reminder that we are family and friends first and work second. As people start settling into “new normals”, they also encourage team members to take the time they need. My direct manager is reminding me to take the necessary time of to help school my kids during our 1:1's and continuously check if I need any further support.
- nadiav1 6y agoThanks for asking! I work at GitLab as Senior Manager, People Operations
- lbotos 6y agoI work at GitLab and don't have children. My routine is pretty much... unchanged since COVID-19. That said, my stress is through the roof, as are other members of the team, not because of GitLab or deadlines or work, but life. Those with kids, I know that it can be even more challenging or exhausting. so in some ways "unaffected" in others "feeling it". Pretty much like everyone else. I can't comment specifics on finances, but I do count my lucky stars that GitLab raised when it did as it personally gives me a little more reassurance that we may be less affected. That said, obvs anything can happen to me or GitLab.
- afandian 6y agoWe've just had a bad experience with GitLab annual renewal, to the point where we didn't know if they'd cancelled our account or not. The billing accounts system seems to be completely disconnected from user accounts. A notification banner was spammed to users in the GitLab.com user interface, saying that our account was going to be cancelled becuase we didn't have auto-renew. The users who got the banner didn't have permission to act on it in the billing system. The billing system said that we _were_ on track to renew, which disagreed with the banner. Eventually it transpired that the end-of-year "truing up" meant that our account was on hold, but we weren't notified of this. And when we _did_ pay the bill we get a banner saying "you've been downgraded to the free plan" when the gitlab.com interface says we hadn't. It really undermined confidence in how well these systems are connected. On the flip side, the fact that everything is open meant that you can see customer support reps raising internal bugs about this stuff. The principle of open-everything makes it more pallatable, but it doesn't make up for lost confidence.
- volgar1x 6y agofault confessed is half redressed
- sytse 6y agoSorry that this happened. We still have a long way to go to improve our billing system. We have allocated more people to it since a few months and are making much faster progress. But it isn’t we’re it should be at the moment.
- afandian 6y agoThanks. No worries, these things happen. It's just a little alarming to see messages like "we've downgraded you to the free plan". Even a bit of help text in the banner, linking to a page on situations under which the message might be raised / not be 100% accurate, might ease the experience.
- sytse 6y agoFor sure. Please also see the response of our product manager in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167232
- sylvain_kerkour 6y agoWow, I didn't expect so much! GitLab, here is my proposal: remove 80~90% of this. Keep the essential. Prove that you are a really innovative company. Stop following analytics. Engage with your users. Prove that you can control entropy and recover your agility rather than going the bureaucratic enterprise software way, just waiting for a more hungry and foolish player to cut the grass under your feet.
- techntoke 6y agoI used to love GitLab, and I still do in a lot of ways but I will no longer recommend them. If you're looking for a shiny pretty interface for all your users, then Gitea can serve the same purpose. Personally, I find cgit to look fine too. I think GitLab simply tries to do too much, and they've built their entire app on a poorly scalable and bloated tech stack. I think SourceHut probably provides the best platform for teaching developers a more native way to use Git that provides most of the same features as GitLab. For CI/CD there are so many better options outside of GitLab that integrate into Kubernetes and you won't regret it.
- spetron 6y agoThis is a great stack to learn from. Does anybody know some other companies that have their business stack available?
- oknoorap 6y agoIs Salesforce still a big things?
- vips7L 6y agoGigantic and for dev jobs it pays extremely well for easy work.
- jart 6y agos/This website uses cookies/This website got mugu'd by European policymakers/
- zubairov 6y agoNice, just curious counting the filled and dotted lines - how this software is integrated together?
- AzzieElbab 6y agoSurprisingly, does not look too messy
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- msluyter 6y agoCurious about whether Salesforce represents a single point of failure. If it goes down or is unavailable, what impact does that have on the rest of the organization?
- ksj2114 6y agoThat's why they bought OwnBackup
- altacc 6y agoIn some architectures it can be, which is a risk. A while ago I was in a day long kick off for a project to replatform a division of a large company, with Salesforce at the core. As it happens, one of the other division's Saleforce instance was down the whole day, bringing down everything. Internal systems, web, sales... everything broken. We listened to the lesson and the architecture we designed ended up not having Salesforce as a dependency for any critical or money producing customer facing functionality. We used Alteryx as a ETL tool to keep Salesforce in sync in almost real time. The customer facing sites and services ran off their independent databases. This also meant that the developers working on that didn't need to know the details about how Salesforce worked, we just mapped Salesforce data to their database.
- wyck 6y agoI do find it a bit weird you released internal handles and employee names.
- onefuncman 6y agoI was amazed to see they doxxed basically every admin they employ... Why bother securing any data when you can just publish it?
- airlines55 6y agoI'm so sick of Gitlab support spam in every thread that mentions any issue, making it so that critical conversations are interrupted with self serving pitches! >I once saw Gitlab do this thing. >Hey, Bob from Gitlab thing here. We are really trying to make thing great for our customers . Our next release of thing will do foo which we hope will fix this. Here is a link to a marketing post comparing us to GitHub. Hope that helps. Please don't mention us in a comment, or I have to do this. It hurts to live.
- babygetoboy 6y agoHey, Jimmy here, vending machine manager at GitLab. I'm sorry that our posts here are concerning. I'm going to run this one right up the ladder for you. Thank you so much for your concern and sorry about your experience with GitLab!
- dominotw 6y agoTheir CEO is the worst offender. Shows up on every gitlab thread with these generic/uninteresting comments.
- airlines55 6y agoThe thing is - I get it. I thi k it's cool when people show up to talk about their product or code that is mentioned on a forum. It's endearing. But when it's systematized by a large corporation, it's no longer so.
- dgritsko 6y agoIt is hilarious to me that this comment is at the top, the rest of the thread is rife with comments from GitLab staff.
- derrick_jensen 6y agoI've noticed a similar thing with Stripe
- michelb 6y agoWould you rather have say, Google’s style of replying on issues with deafening silence? I see your point though. I think it’s better this way. A company can be helpful or shoot themselves in the foot while they figure out to communicate. Too much salesy self-serving talk means they don’t take you seriously so why should you return the favor? Now you can find out easily.
- scarface74 6y agoAnd HN users only worry about “cloud lock-in”. I’ve said dozens of times that the typical largish company is locked in to dozens of SAAS offerings that would be a major pain and expense to migrate away from. Once you choose your infrastructure, you might as well go all in. Just look at their dependence on SalesForce.
- swyx 6y agohmm.. something's missing. does the dev team itself not use any systems?? hard to believe
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- the_jeremy 6y agoI notice that Nanoc, the static site generator they use for their docs pages, isn't mentioned there. Maybe it's just too small to matter?