September 2015 Summaries

GitLab has announced a $4 million Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures to enhance its global operations, following a successful seed round. The company plans to utilize the funds to accelerate growth and scale its development, marketing, and sales efforts, alongside the upcoming release of GitLab 8.0, which promises enhanced storage efficiency, faster merging, integrated Continuous Integration, and improved user functionality. GitLab is used by over 100,000 organizations, including NASA and SpaceX, and aims to become the default open-source solution for software development and collaboration. The company offers three product versions: a free Community Edition, a SaaS GitLab.com version, and an Enterprise version, emphasizing accessibility and transparency. With this funding, GitLab aspires to expand its feature set and reach, further establishing itself as a leading open-source code collaboration platform. The company credits its success to a vibrant community of contributors and is actively seeking new collaborators to join its efforts in expanding its platform.

GitLab operates a unique workflow characterized by monthly releases on the 22nd, featuring major changes and improvements based on community and customer feedback. The company embraces a completely remote and self-organizing structure, where developers work independently without predefined teams or strict adherence to agile methodologies, yet align with agile principles. Issues are created when requests come in, and consensus is reached through open discussions involving relevant parties. Scheduling is flexible, often challenged by capacity issues, and prioritization is guided by a general set of criteria, with particular attention to promised features. Overflow of issues is managed by re-evaluating their relevance and reassigning them as necessary. Developers are empowered to choose their tasks, which fosters openness, independence, and responsibility in decision-making, with updates communicated asynchronously. The workflow emphasizes speed and flexibility over rigid processes, maintaining an open environment that encourages equal contribution from the community and customers, though concerns about scalability persist as the company grows rapidly.

GitLab is seeking to enhance its integration capabilities with the Open Science Framework (OSF) to promote open research collaboration by offering a grant of USD 8,000 - 10,000 through the Center for Open Science (COS) for developers who can facilitate this integration. OSF is an open-source platform that connects various services in the research lifecycle, already integrating with major storage providers and citation tools. The integration aims to make GitLab a viable storage option for researchers, thereby supporting research efficiency and reproducibility. Proposals for the grant should detail the team's qualifications, an assessment of relevant APIs, and a development plan for a three-month cycle. All code developed must be open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis to expedite funding and project initiation.

GitLab.com experienced an hour-long outage due to what initially appeared to be a filesystem corruption issue on their NFS server, which slowed down the entire platform. Upon investigation, error messages from the server (specifically, ext4 errors) had been occurring regularly since the filesystem was first mounted, and were not a new or escalating issue as initially feared. The team opted to abort the filesystem check and restored GitLab.com to normal operation, while acknowledging the need to move data off the ext4 filesystem due to size limitations. Despite doubling the number of servers to handle traffic after a similar issue the previous week, the root cause of the NFS slowdowns remains unclear, with no direct correlation found between ext4 errors and NFS troubles. During this incident, communication with users was lacking, highlighting a need for better crisis communication practices from the operations team.