Gitlab went metal, critique their proposed purchases

[gigatexal]

Proposed server purchase for GitLab.com | GitLab

Saw this over at hacker news

Thoughts?

 

[Patrick]

Does anyone know the gitlab team?

I am in a plane back to SFO and have quite a few thoughts. Too many to type on the phone.

 

[T_Minus]

My head went

 

[gigatexal]

Does anyone know the gitlab team?

I am in a plane back to SFO and have quite a few thoughts. Too many to type on the phone.

I don't. But I'm sure the STH team could provide them some proper feedback

 

[T_Minus]

"If You’re Good at Something, Never Do it for Free."

Especially if it's "what you do" for a living

 

[gigatexal]

"If You’re Good at Something, Never Do it for Free."

Especially if it's "what you do" for a living

oh of course, I wasn't saying people should offer free advice -- just critique their proposals. Patrick said he had a lot of thoughts on the matter. I was curious what they were.

I'm sure they could benefit from the DemoEval @ STH.

 

[danws6]

A few of thoughts (disclaimer: I skimmed the article and read sections that popped out so I might have missed some points):

1. They are creating a headache by only going into a single data center if they plan on having 24/7 SLAs.
   
2. The are underestimating how much spare hardware they will want on hand.
   
3. They might be better off negotiating a bulk purchase deal on hardware from Dell, HP, etc (with added benefit of quick replacement hardware support).
   
4. I know very little about CephFS but in general distributed file systems can be fun to down right painful. (I've built/managed 50+ node Hadoop clusters which fortunately was not).
   
5. They'd potentially be better off just renting bare metal servers from some place like Softlayer which would get them in multiple data centers and handle a lot of the data center monkey work that they aren't expecting to deal with.

 

[Patrick]

Well I got a contact and sent an offer. We shall see.

There are a few standouts for me, e.g. using 10Gbase-T over 40GbE, especially since they are trying to do hyper-converged on the nodes.

 

[gigatexal]

Well I got a contact and sent an offer. We shall see.

There are a few standouts for me, e.g. using 10Gbase-T over 40GbE, especially since they are trying to do hyper-converged on the nodes.

Patrick do you do consulting on the side?

 

[Jon Massey]

I can't help but skim the title as "Gitlab went mental"... Au contraire it seems quite sensible when you see their hosting bill!

Anyway, yeah I was surprised to see 10GBase-T as well. Hopefully you'll set them right, Patrick!

 

[Patrick]

Patrick do you do consulting on the side?

About once a week I end up helping smaller companies think through their initial infrastructure plans. Sometimes just part of DemoEval.

Certainly a far cry to the consulting I was doing 15 months ago.

 

[gigatexal]

About once a week I end up helping smaller companies think through their initial infrastructure plans. Sometimes just part of DemoEval.

Certainly a far cry to the consulting I was doing 15 months ago.

itching to get back into it?

I think the STH forums are really cool because there's a lot of industry experts here fellow nerds out -- if only someone from gitlab posted a question here i wonder what they'd get...

without being an expert myself I'd figure renting bare-metal (as was mentioned above) would be the way to go if they really wanted metal but didn't want to outlay the costs all up front for the hardware and the bandwidth