How We Knew It Was Time to Leave the Cloud
So Gitlab is in a bit of a strange position here. Sticking to a traditional filesystem interface (distributed under the hood) seems stupid at first. Surely there are better technical solutions.<p>However, considering they make money out of private installs of gitlab, it makes sense to keep gitlab.com as an eat-your-own-dog-food-at-scale environment. Necessary for them to keep experience with large installs of gitlab. If one of their customers that run on-prem has performance issues they can&#x27;t just say: gitlab.com uses a totally different architecture so you&#x27;re on your own. They need gitlab.com to be as close as possible to the standard product.<p>Pivotal does the same thing with Pivotal Web Services, their public Cloud Foundry solution. All of their money is made in Pivotal Cloud Foundry (private installs).<p>From a business perspective, private installs are a way of distributed computing. Pretty clever, and good way of minimizing risk.