Responding to community questions on social media isn't just a marketing task. Every question should be answered by the employee that is responsible for that part of the business. Your employees will be exposed to direct feedback about their work and your community will always get the best possible response. This is also the best way to ensure that you're building a product that people actually want. See how we achieved this with Respondo [1].
We're just getting started and we'd love to hear your feedback! [2]
Support for RBAC for GitLab Managed Apps was added in 11.4 [1]. You can also connect any Kubernetes cluster hosted anywhere - see the docs on that [2].
What problems are you hitting when installing GitLab on Kubernetes? You can always open an issue about it so it can be prioritized for fixing.
We have some low-level stuff on our roadmap (e.g. federated Merge Requests [1], federated GitLab instances [2], cross-platform mentions [3] - i.e. mentioning GitHub users). These didn't get prioritized yet, but it's only a matter of time. We have limited resources so we have to prioritize and scope out releases in a such a way that it advances both our vision and satisfies customer requests.
A really interesting low-level component that we created and use in production is gitaly [4] (which is a git RPC component that aims to completely remove GitLab's dependency on NFS for repository access - and replace it with gitaly itself).
I genuinely feel this is not the case. GitLab is so much more - it encompasses the full DevOps Lifecycle in a single application. If you haven't checked out our homepage recently, it might be interesting for you to rediscover what GitLab offers - https://about.gitlab.com/
Full disclosure: I work for GitLab, but what I stated above has nothing to do with the fact, it's how I personally see GitLab as a product.
We're working on making GitLab as fast as possible. We have a list of all ongoing efforts to improve performance of GitLab (the product) at [1]. There's also a list of ongoing efforts for improving performance and availability of GitLab.com specifically [2] (performance) and [3] (availability).
As for the differences compared to being on Azure. We don't have any definitive results right now. We'll have to wait for Monday so we can get more performance data. Most likely, we'll have a better image if and how performance changed in the middle of next week. That being said, we did observe an improvement in p95 response time for our web and api nodes - it's a roughly 30% to 40% reduction. We're working on a public monitoring page so you and the community can browse through these metrics at your own leisure.
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With regards to the Education program - it's now in full swing and available to everyone. You can apply via [4]. We sent out an automated email to let people know it was still in preparation some time ago. It should have been followed up with an email stating that it's fully functional too. Not sure why the university you work at didn't get the second one. Let me know if there's any holdups with your application after you apply through the linked form.
I'll try and clear up any confusion you might have about GitLab. Feel free to ask more questions if I left something out.
> I can't find anything describing the relationship between GitLab and Git anywhere on the home page.
The relation between git and GitLab is that GitLab is a front-end for git. However, it's so much more than that. We strive to offer features that encompass the whole DevOps lifecycle - see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope for more context.
We have an integrated CI/CD system, issue tracker with boards and epics, built-in container registry, monitoring and many many others. All of them are listed in https://about.gitlab.com/features/
> Likewise, I honestly can't tell whether GitLab is an OSS project or some sort of hosted enterprise "call us for pricing" behemoth
We offer a proprietary version with added features - GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee . It has a proprietary license. Even though it's proprietary, Enterprise Edition is source-visible i.e. you can browse the source.
> There's a pricing page with various plans including a free plan, but while I initially assumed they were for a hosted online service, apparently they're for self-hosted.
There's both a hosted solution (GitLab.com) and the option of self-hosting. The pricing page has two tabs - one for self-hosted options and the other for GitLab.com
> There is information about many ways to install GitLab locally on different platforms, but it's not clear what you're actually installing at that point or whether you then need some sort of licence to do anything with it.
No matter which package of GitLab (Community Edition or Enterprise Edition) you install locally, you'll always be able to access the free tier of features without a license.
> On the features page, each item has two different scales under it, one for GitLab and one for GitLab.com, but I really have no idea what the relationship between those is.
There's four feature / pricing tiers for self-hosted instances: Core (Free), Starter, Premium and Ultimate. From left to right, every tier has more features than the previous one. The distribution of features is documented in https://about.gitlab.com/features/ (upper scale).
If you opt for a hosted solution on GitLab.com, there's also 4 pricing / feature tiers: Free, Bronze, Silver and Gold. All public projects have access to Gold-tier features for free. The feature distribution between these tiers is also documented in https://about.gitlab.com/features/ (lower scale).
> There is an entirely separate feature comparison table that is actually linked from the pricing page, but that only shows one of the scales, and suggests that the lower/free tier is quite restrictive.
We prioritize features for one of the paid tiers if we think the feature is more relevant for larger organizations.