I'm happy to see this - I could not agree more with these points.
I think they are coming at this problem from the wrong perspective - instead of growing from virtual servers to their own dedicated hardware to get better CephFS performance, they should take a hard look at their application and see if they can architect it in a way that does not require a complex distributed filesystem to present a single mount that they can expose over NFS. At some point in the future, it will bite them. Not an if, but a when.
In addition, this means that running physical hardware, CephFS and Kubernetes (among other things) are now going to be part of their core competencies - I think they are going to underestimate the cost to GitLab in the long run. When they need to pay for someone to be a 30 minute drive from their DC 24/7/365 after the first outage, when they realize how much spare hardware they are going to want around, etc.
As someone who has run large scale Ceph before (though not CephFS, thankfully), it's not easy to run at scale. We had a team of 5 software engineers as well as an Ops and Hardware team, and we had to do a lot to get it stable. It's not as easy as installing it and walking away.
I think they are coming at this problem from the wrong perspective - instead of growing from virtual servers to their own dedicated hardware to get better CephFS performance, they should take a hard look at their application and see if they can architect it in a way that does not require a complex distributed filesystem to present a single mount that they can expose over NFS. At some point in the future, it will bite them. Not an if, but a when.
In addition, this means that running physical hardware, CephFS and Kubernetes (among other things) are now going to be part of their core competencies - I think they are going to underestimate the cost to GitLab in the long run. When they need to pay for someone to be a 30 minute drive from their DC 24/7/365 after the first outage, when they realize how much spare hardware they are going to want around, etc.
As someone who has run large scale Ceph before (though not CephFS, thankfully), it's not easy to run at scale. We had a team of 5 software engineers as well as an Ops and Hardware team, and we had to do a lot to get it stable. It's not as easy as installing it and walking away.