This blog post was originally published on the GitLab Unfiltered blog. It was reviewed and republished on 2021-05-07.
We are amazed at the sheer number of people who particpated in GitLab's 10-day certification offer of a 100% discount. In just two days there were more than 60,000 people who created an account in GitLab Learn, more than 8,000 people enrolled in the GitLab Certified Associate Self-Service pathway, more than 6,000 people started the hands-on labs, and more than 500 submitted your completed hands-on lab for the certification exam. We were able to award certifications to hundreds of people during that time!
We love your enthusiasm and excitement about earning a GitLab certification, which you expressed on everything from social media posts to video walkthroughs on YouTube. Unfortunately, we had only anticipated about 4,000 users for this 10-day program and the systems behind the scenes supporting the learning experience were unable to keep up with the sudden spike in the number of users. We eventually exceeded the user capacity limit on our third-party learning management platform and our internal hands-on training lab infrastructure. This is separate from our GitLab.com SaaS infrastructure. GitLab SaaS customers were not impacted. Due to the user capacity limit, we had to make the difficult decision to end the discount period much sooner than we had planned. We are working to autoscale our training systems to support the demand.
For those of you who were excited to take advantage of the discount and thought you had more time to take advantage of it, we are very sorry to have built up your excitement and then let you down - please accept our sincere apologies. If you have already redeemed the discount code and hands-on lab invitation code, please continue to complete your coursework in GitLab Learn and submit your project to us.
Over the coming days and weeks we will determine both short-term and long-term solutions to provide improved capacity. As we iterate and scale GitLab Learn, we'll be incorporating the lessons we learned with this event.
There is still plenty of free learning in GitLab Learn including Gitlab 101, GitLab 201, Remote Work, and DIB badges. We hope you'll continue to use GitLab Learn and visit often to check out new offerings as they become available.
Your comments are welcome here!
Tell us how we could have done better.
