We are in the process of migrating a series of kubernetes (GKE) deployment pipelines over to gitlab SaaS (gitlab.com). As a part of the migration process, we have been planning to use the gitlab container registry as the image source in our kubernetes deployment yaml. (we have to use an ImagePullSecret as well to authenticate).
What concerns me about this plan, is that the GitLab Container Registry is now effectively a dependency of our production environment. GitLab doesn’t publish a specific SLA for their registry or make any guarantees around uptime. FWIW, they do publish overall GitLab SLA metrics (which are very good). However, any time our kubernetes cluster attempts to scale a deployment and launch new pods, it will need to re-pull the image from gitlab.
Are other companies using the GitLab container registry in production? Is the lack of a published SLA for this feature a concern for anyone else? The alternative is to just push the image over to google’s artifact repository as part of our deployment pipelines, but that means having the images in two places and results in a much more complicated pipeline.