Cloud native

Toward the end of 2016 and at the start of 2017, there was a public debate in the GitLab community about whether reverting back from the cloud to bare metal would be cost-effective for GitLab.com. At the time, the filesystem used for repositories was Ceph. The performance of that distributed filesystem was not good enough to handle GitLab.com. They asked the community for advice and received a lot of feedback from people who experienced similar moves firsthand. In the end, the decision was made to stay in the cloud (https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/). Instead, GitLab would focus on creating a solution, not on the filesystem level, but making sure that Git input/output (I/O) behavior is better managed at the application level. This can be seen as the birth of the Gitaly component. Sid Sijbrandij emphasized the importance of being...