Gitlab SaaS CDN

Hi,

I’m curious if Gitlab has, or has ever considered, using a CDN setup like Netflix has?

I’m referring to the program where Netflix peers with ISPs to reduce bandwidth costs and improve service delivery to end users.

The reason I ask is that many Gitlab users have infrastructure with Azure, GCP, AWS and use Gitlab SaaS for all of their actual operations. What I see is that with private gitlab runners that run in the public cloud infrastructure we have and connect to our Gitlab SaaS namespace, pipelines that publish artifacts to Gitlab have very low bandwidth (1-5MB/s) while running the same job on Gitlab hosted runners has much higher bandwidth (~40MB/s)

Admittedly, it could certainly be possible that there’s some way to improve the speed on the Azure side (in our infrastructure) to make it somewhat faster, but I don’t foresee that it would ever come as close.

So what I was hoping is that Gitlab has, or would consider trying to setup a similar deal like what Netflix does; partner with Azure, AWS, GCP and other public cloud providers to have Gitlab infrastructure that runs within each provider’s network, which may save Gitlab a lot of money and will simultaneously improve the service from each cloud provider’s infrastructure.

Hi,

CDN is for publishing stuff - users are only fetching the data. It can’t be used to actually write something. You can’t write anything to Netflix GitLab is indeed using Cloudflare as CDN.

Having something similar for writes would mean having a robust sync solution to avoid any possible conflicts which would bring much more costs imo.

Thanks for the response. Since writing this, I’ve figured out that it’s possible to self-host Gitlab in our own Azure infrastructure, which ultimately is what I was looking for, albeit with one small difference in that I was originally hoping for a managed offering.

@tspearconquest I noticed there is a new offering GitLab Dedicated | GitLab although it’s still only for AWS.

Hi, thanks! That’s a great find, I really appreciate it! Even with it being on AWS, it would be better than the SaaS offering for us because of the prioritized support that would be offered. I’ve heard it’s going to be extremely expensive though, which is probably going to prevent my company from adopting it until we expand our client base enough to justify the cost, sadly.