The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
GitLab is the engine that powers many software businesses. In a world where success requires developers to move quickly, it is important to ensure that end users can accomplish their work as quickly as possible, with minimal interruptions, and they have access to the latest and greatest that GitLab has to offer. The Distribution group's mission is to set companies up for success by making it easy to deploy, maintain, and update a self-managed GitLab instance and ensure it is highly available for their users.
The distribution team is comprised of two groups, Distribution Build and Distribution Deploy.
The focus for the Deploy group of the Distribution team surrounds configuration, deployment, and operation of GitLab as a whole product. The goal is to deliver an intuitive, clear, and frictionless installation experience, followed by smooth, seamless upgrade and maintenance processes for deployments of any scale. We strive to deliver ongoing operational behaviors for scaling, little to zero downtime upgrades, and highly reliable experiences for not only instance administrators but their users.
The Deploy group will move towards an Operator first investment. The GitLab Operator is where the Deploy group is investing much of its development effort, because of the many benefits the Operator will bring in features for running GitLab instances. Near-zero downtime upgrades, advanced metrics and alerting, and deployment auto-pilot essentially are all on the roadmap for Distribution Deploy. We will not deprecate the Helm chart entirely until we have a simple migration experience in place, from Helm to the Operator, and have provided ample notice of the shift.
The focus for the Build group of the Distribution team is to ensure the components that make up GitLab are tested, up-to-date, license compliant, and available for our users’ platforms and architectures. This segment manages the build pipelines, researches support for new services, platforms, and architectures, as well as maintains existing ones. We strive to respond efficiently to build failures, security results, and dependency changes in order to ensure a safe reliable product for our users.
The Build group will continue to build for diverse Omnibus deployments but will work to bring our cloud native builds forward in features and functionality. We will move our cloud native build away from the helm chart, and invest heavily in the GitLab Operator in 2022. The Build group will work on foundation changes to allow for the success of the GitLab Operator implementation. Additional projects for the Build group will include package improvements such as how components are built and work together in the Omnibus project and then paralleling those change in the charts, and repo signing key management via keyring packages.
Both group work on the two categories of distribution below.
Today we have a mature and easy to use Omnibus based build system, which is the most common method for deploying a self-managed instance of GitLab. It includes everything a customer needs to run GitLab all in a single package, and is great for installing on virtual machines or real hardware. We are committed to making our package easier to work with, providing a first-class solution for database fault tolerance, and improving the zero-downtime upgrade experience.
Category Vision · Documentation
We also want GitLab to be the best cloud native development tool, and offering a great cloud native deployment is a key part of that. We are focused on offering a flexible and scalable container based deployment on Kubernetes and OpenShift.
The Helm charts are currently considered to be at the Complete maturity level. We hope to achieve lovable maturity of our cloud-native installation in FY2023 and recommend in on par with out Omnibus package. We also have developed the GitLab Operator (https://docs.gitlab.com/charts/installation/operator.html), which will continue to mature and help our cloud-native installation mature. These epics will be used to define what it will take to get to the next maturity levels and track the work to be done: