I'd wager they got some kind of discount or exclusive pricing as well? Big ticket companies (which Gitlab could arguably be called in the tech world) moving to a cloud platform could generate a fair bit of buzz and free marketing?
The plan to move to Google Cloud was in motion for many months, way before talks about a potential GitHub acquisition started.
They adopted Kubernetes relatively early, and as they progressed their reliance on Azure-specific services went down. At that point move to another cloud was a purely financial decision.
The move to k8s was not strictly a means to allow cloud migration. GitLab sells their Enteprise product, and the Kubernetes-based deployment helps customers with product trial and adoption. Cloud migration is a welcomed side-effect of that initiative.
They have a goals a section:
Goals of the GCP Migration Project
> In order of descending priority. Most important goals at the top.
1) Use the opportunity of an inter-cloud migration to make GitLab.com suitable for mission critical client workloads
Migrate GitLab.com from the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform to the Google Cloud while keeping downtime to a minimum
2) Use the same helm charts for GitLab.com as our EEP customers use
3) The goal here is for customers to be able to spin up a 10 person GitLab EEP instance in Kubernetes and scale it up to 100k users (or more) with little effort.
4) Use the migration as a marketing opportunity for GitLab Inc through creation of technical content
I wonder if Gitlab is trying to make themselves more Google friendly in hope of a Google acquisition?
In the news about the Microsoft GitHub acquisition,it was mentioned that Google also tried to acquire Github. So Google is definitely interested in buying an open source project host.
My guess would be that that is so long ago, most of the people responsible or involved have churned out of Google already. I don't recall that move ever generating the kind of outrage that e.g. shutting down Google Reader did.
So probably just one more inhabitant of Google's forgotten island of misfit toys.
We've not spent a lot of time on making this publicly readable, but the migration is moving forward steadily. We don't have a planned switchover data yet, but it's safe to say that it'll happen this summer.
25 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 91.5 ms ] threadI'd be curious to hear if Microsoft buying GitHub had anything to do with it as well.
For just one tip of that iceberg, this Wikipedia article seems like a good place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation
They adopted Kubernetes relatively early, and as they progressed their reliance on Azure-specific services went down. At that point move to another cloud was a purely financial decision.
The move to k8s was not strictly a means to allow cloud migration. GitLab sells their Enteprise product, and the Kubernetes-based deployment helps customers with product trial and adoption. Cloud migration is a welcomed side-effect of that initiative.
And this is the promise of k8s for companies (and the peril of k8s for cloud providers).
> In order of descending priority. Most important goals at the top.
1) Use the opportunity of an inter-cloud migration to make GitLab.com suitable for mission critical client workloads Migrate GitLab.com from the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform to the Google Cloud while keeping downtime to a minimum
2) Use the same helm charts for GitLab.com as our EEP customers use
3) The goal here is for customers to be able to spin up a 10 person GitLab EEP instance in Kubernetes and scale it up to 100k users (or more) with little effort.
4) Use the migration as a marketing opportunity for GitLab Inc through creation of technical content
You are unlikely to find an explanation in their docs.
Here's a likely answer:
> Kubernetes? Yeah right... The reasons are very clear: 1) GitHub being acquired by Microsoft. 2) Google is an investor in GitLab (through GV).
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17393503
In the news about the Microsoft GitHub acquisition,it was mentioned that Google also tried to acquire Github. So Google is definitely interested in buying an open source project host.
What a world we live in!
So probably just one more inhabitant of Google's forgotten island of misfit toys.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
But those dates seem pretty much passed: (removed table from gdocs, couldn't get formatting right now)
We're writing a blog post on it here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...