Nomenclature for GitLab across marketplaces
History on distribution, naming and marketplaces
To date we have engaged tactically with marketplaces and treated each marketplace in isolation. This has resulted in many different naming conventions in the market, possible confusion with our customers and most importantly inconsistent availability of offerings depending on cloud or marketplace. All marketplaces currently have VM based offerings, 3 have K8/container offerings.
Most customers are in a marketplace to quickly launch and test a solution. Individual developers may continue to use what was launched in the marketplace however most enterprises will build GitLab themselves when they want to go to production. We should be careful to always highlight that a marketplace offering is not HA and if we are selling listings keep them to a small number of licenses to help ensure that we do not lead our customers down a bad path. Using a marketplace (currently only AWS) to handle larger and more complex transactions should be handled in a case by case basis.
Assumptions dictating the suggested nomenclature:
- When customers are selecting an image they are going to select first by and certification or listing directly from the marketplace owner (see VMware's listing below where the majority of downloads are from the VMware built solution) and second by the vendor that built the software, in this case GitLab.
- Users will assume there is a cost when they see "Enterprise Edition" - hence the need to use free
- Users will not have looked at or understood our pricing and tiering methodology (ie core means nothing to them)
Suggested nomenclature and listings
- Gitlab Enterprise Edition (free) should be used in place of all current CE offerings and where we currently have BYOL (MSFT)
- GitLab Enterprise Edition - Ultimate (5 user) should be used for ultimate listings
- GitLab Enterprise Edition - Premium (5 user) should be used for premium listings
- GitLab Enterprise Edition (free) - K8s/Helm should be used where we have K8s/Helm
- GitLab Enterprise Edition - Ultimate (5 user) - K8s/Helm should be used for ultimate listings
- GitLab Enterprise Edition - Premium (5 user) - K8s/Helm should be used for premium listings
Current offerings in marketplaces (Aug 2019)
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?x=0&y=0&searchTerms=gitlab)
AWS Marketplace (8 offerings all VM based, 2 from GitLab
Additionally many companies/developers use AMI (amazon machine images). In this case there are 465 in the east region
Google Cloud Marketplace
3 offerings, 2 VM based and 1 K8s/Helm, 1 from GitLab (k8s)
Microsoft
10 offerings all VM's, 2 from GitLab. NOTE: searching GitLab brings up GitHub. MSFT has K8s marketplace offerings but none for GitLab. Searching GitHub also brings up GitLab
VMware
VMware has 6 offerings, 5 VM based and 1/K8s/Helm. GitLab has one offering (Gitlab EE core) VMware has just bought Bitnami and are building out a new marketplace that they are going to launch at VMWorld (Aug 26th, 2019). Below is the current view but will be changing shortly.
Digital Ocean
Only 1 GitLab listing. It is GitLab EE core and managed built by Digital Ocean. they are starting with K8s/container applications and do not have a vm/omnibus offering.