This affected my company. Thet got rid of the "starter" tier at $6 / user / month. That meant going up to the premium tier at $19. Just a couple years later that has gone up to $29. For a company that already has other tools for all of the "extra value add" that they're bringing, it hurts. Gitlab really has a great feature set for the core git server + ci experience, it's not worth so much. I've asked several different folks to bring back a starter license to no avail. We want to pay, but we don't use any of the "premium" add-ons.
Kapitan sounds interesting. It definitely looks difficult to figure out. Even your blog post only gives me a hint, leaving me with lots of questions. I am going to o dig deeper.
Kapitan founder here! Please reach out on the kapitan channel of the kubernetes slack, or connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alledm
I have been working on a couple of video tutorials that could be helpful to get started
I've been using Hetzner for many years. I've had a couple maintenances on baremetal servers over the last several years. Otherwise, the only down time has been self inflicted.
The Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians) as well as the Sumerians we're all attracted to the Mesopotamian area in general due to it being between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They flooded on regular intervals, thus creating fertile land despite the general desert like climate.
So, it seems like the proprietary builds are for the managed services that they host themselves, which makes sense.