Dive Brief:

• GitLab is leaving the cloud in favor of its own dedicated hardware, according to a company blog written by Pablo Carranza, GitLab Senior DevOps Engineer.

• The company has struggled with storage challenges as it scales, and bare metal is "more economical and reliable for the scale and performance of our application," said Carranze. 

• "We’re feeling the pain of running a high performance distributed filesystem on the cloud," Carranza wrote.

Dive Insight:

GitLab is an application designed to let people code, test and deploy code together. Using cloud requires the company to share infrastructure with a lot of other organizations, and that doesn’t work well at the level GitLab operates, Carranza said. 

Though he acknowledges hardware comes at a cost, Carranza said in the long run buying and supporting their own hardware will make GitLab "more efficient, consistent and reliable as we will have more ownership of the entire infrastructure."

While the cloud is still growing at breakneck speed, the technology is not for all businesses. Early this year, Dropbox also announced it was taking the unusual move of leveraging its own home-built infrastructure rather than relying on external providers.

By March, Dropbox announced it had transferred about 90% of its IT infrastructure away from Amazon Web Services. Like GitLab, Dropbox maintains that keeping infrastructure resources in-house is the best solution for its unique needs.