> *Note: Promotion code available for new DigitalOcean customers only.
This type of promotion really aggravates me. I'm not just saying this only about the announced GitLab/DigitialOcean partnership, but rather as a general comment as I see this customer acquisition ruse quite a lot elsewhere too.
I spend money with DigitalOcean. I don't feel particularly rewarded for my loyalty when I can't enjoy the same promotion as some new customer, who may never spend another cent with DO.
Kind of off-topic, but the work GitLab is putting in and the things they come up with every other day is crazily impressive. We moved from Github to GitLab sometime ago and we believed that to be a trade-off for moving to our own infrastructure. It always seemed like GitLab wasn't "quite there". Today, however it is a whole different story. We pretty much cannot go back to Github at all because of how well-integrated, stable and beautiful this product is.
For more information about the autoscaling see https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-runner-1-1-releas... Questions about anything GitLab are very welcome.
I love both GitLab and DigitalOcean, but why do I feel so devalued by IT deflation? The longer I'm part of something and the more effort I put into promoting a platform, the less perks I get. Why? I understand the importance of new customers, but why do you alienate the loyal user-base that made you what you are today? Are we rewarding ignorance now?
In the shared runner settings, I see this:
"GitLab Runners do not offer secure isolation between projects that they do builds for. You are TRUSTING all GitLab users who can push code to project A, B or C to run shell scripts on the machine hosting runner X."
Seems like a very strong reason to use one's own paid DigitalOcean instances for runners instead of using the free shared runners, at least for commercial projects. I was wondering if anyone from GitLab could expand further on this?
Speaking on a more meta level here,this is an interesting phase of Product offerings.
We have a single giant whose products are used by the masses(Google/Uber/Github-in this sense) which had customer-focussed /domain-oriented paths but seem to have lost it midway, and then we have smaller/modular companies who are more focused to the domain improvement in itself (DDG,Lyft,Gitlab) who partner up with other specialised companies(Yandex/Didi Kaudi/DO) to remain customer-focussed /domain-oriented.
In the meantime the consumers get to choose between what the world chose and what could be a more sensible decision.
> GitLab partnered with DigitalOcean to provide free Runners to all projects on GitLab.com
Wow, I hope that doesn't get abused and taken away.
The thing that made CI more affordable for us was to rent our own Hetzner servers, and switch to https://buildkite.com
Prior to this we were with CircleCI, and before that Travis CI.
I use self-hosted gitlab as my primary CI and love it. Setting up CI runners is still too complicated (maybe because I use the gitlab docker image and there's no compose support). drone.io seems to have better support for deploying & cleaning up images, but I'm sure gitlab will get there.
More affordable than free? Not sure I get this. Is CI really so hard that we need to pay someone else to do this? I have a perfectly good server doing nothing and I installed TeamCity on that. Works great and is essentially free.
As of today DO remains to be my experimental playground for testing new ideas, linode is my official site, it seems DO keeps its innovative momentum and I begin to wonder when or should I switch over fully, Gitlab adds one more point on DO side certainly.
Install `gitlab-ci-multi-runner` on your existing droplet and enjoy (relatively) free CI with high priority. GitLab already made it incredibly simple to setup.
Great news, awesome partnership. Nice work team! :clap:
Came here to post it, but too late! Good job @fweespee_ch! The importance of this announcement is that DigitalOcean is all over Fortune 500, and GitLab partnership means that Git is not only mainstream - it's THE stream.
I have a (perhaps) more incendiary take on this kind of thing. I have no problem with promo codes for new customers. Zero. None. As a business owner, I know damn well there are some products or services that need a little "taster" offered to a potential customer to get them even modestly interested.
Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired. You had your reasons for signing up for DO, and apparently, the lack of a $10 credit wasn't one of them. And we all know this is a flimsy firewall to breech anyway - a different e-mail address that - if you're really feeling saucy - you could have delivered to an SMTP daemon on your existing droplet.
Promotions are by definition a form of publicity or advertisement, and if you're already a customer, you're already a customer, know what I mean? Why advertise "hey, check us out" if you've already checked them out and signed on the dotted line.
If you feel really, really, really burned by this, do what other cost-conscious consumers do, and whenever you see a box "promo code" on a signup form, Google "example.com promo code" (substituting the actual domain name, obviously) and see what you can find.
I do not understand, even a little bit, the amount of outrage over the fact that you want a company to spend advertising money (that's what a promotion is budgeted to) to advertise to an existing customer. Not unless you feel that DO isn't worth it already, that is, and in that case, what the hell is $10 going to do to change your mind?