> Like many companies in the last year we've switched to using Slack to improve internal communication. [...] Since Slack doesn't offer an on-premises version, we searched for other options. We found Mattermost to be the leading open source Slack-alternative and suggested a collaboration to the Mattermost team.
I'm not really sure why it's 'GitLab Mattermost' and not (at your link) 'GitLab Nginx' et al. though.
They posted a giant list of the services they use recently.
They use a ton of services.
Likely you don't want your backup to be one of your systems and another part of the company probably uses Zoom already so it is probably easy to fail over to that.
This includes many proprietary ones, we generally choose the product that will work best for us, considering the benefits of open source, but not excluding proprietary software.
Mattermost is not part of the single application that GitLab is. There is a good integration between with GitLab and our Omnibus installer allows you to easily install it. But it is a separate application from a separate company.
It's just due diligence. Think of what you have access to if you have "god mode" on corporate chat: HR, the CFO's DMs, private messages between other coworkers, and so on. Most won't fall for this temptation, but even those with strong anti-spying morals can be weakened by circumstances. Best to remove the temptation by design.
Because someone else's devops can't use it against you institutionally. Nor is going to insist on having an opinion on things that they're unaffected by.
This isn't a slam at devops, it's about the need for institutional information hiding; not everyone needs to know about and weigh in on every decision being made.
We structure our company similarly. With effort DevOps is god on everything except HR, Sales, Finance, Chat, and C-level management which are operated with 3rd party services controlled by the individual departments and "owned/managed" by the C-suite.
DevOps at a lot of small companies also manage the internal IT stack and sometimes even take on most of the IT duties. Once you get larger you start having "IT" as something separate from DevOps but with the actual infrastructure managed by operations. Once you're really big the teams are truly separate and IT owns their own infra.
