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.
This page outlines the Direction for the GitLab Dedicated category and belongs to the GitLab Dedicated group. To provide feedback or ask questions about this product category, reach out to the Product Manager.
This document and linked pages contain information related to upcoming products, features, and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only. Please do not rely on this information for purchasing or planning purposes. As with all projects, the items mentioned in this document and linked pages are subject to change or delay. The development, release, and timing of any products, features, or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
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GitLab Dedicated's objective is to provide a GitLab SaaS offering to large enterprises and customers in industries with strict security and compliance requirements. When adopting DevOps tools, customers increasingly prefer SaaS to reduce operational cost, but customers in highly-regulated industries (e.g. Healthcare, Finance, and Public sectors) can't compromise on their security and compliance requirements when moving to SaaS. These requirements (e.g. isolated storage of source code IP) often dictate the need to be on separate Cloud Infrastructure from other tenants. This makes it challenging for these customers to adopt a shared-tenancy SaaS solution like gitlab.com.
Additionally, customers in regulated industries often require the ability to connect users or services running in their corporate network to their source code repositories running in the cloud via a private network connection. As a public-facing SaaS service, GitLab.com can't support this type of private connectivity easily by default. Finally, large, globally-distributed enterprises need the ability to control the location and number of Geo Replica sites to reduce latency for their workforce around the world. Some of our Self-Managed customers have 5+ Geo sites, and for them to consume SaaS they may need more global coverage than what we offer on GitLab.com today.
For these customers, a higher level of tenant isolation and deployment customization is required. While some customers may be satisfied leveraging a partner MSP, customers may prefer to consume the service directly from GitLab so that they have a single-point of contact for operational accountability.
GitLab Dedicated will solve these needs by offering a fully isolated, private GitLab instance, deployed in the customer's cloud regions of choice. The instance is fully hosted and managed by GitLab Inc enabling customers to offload operational overhead and focus on more business-critical tasks.
In addition to delivering customer value, GitLab Dedicated will also benefit internal GitLab teams. We envision the tooling we build for Dedicated being used as the single method going forward for running all of GitLab Inc's SaaS services. This will allow us to achieve even greater returns on our initial investment by enabling any future SaaS services to quickly get started with a robust and standardized foundation.
There are two major trends emerging when it comes to the delivery of Cloud based solutions:
GitLab Dedicated is for organizations that want to benefit from both SaaS and Private Cloud. By delivering this offering we will set ourselves up to achieve customer success as these two trends further accelerate in 2025.
GitLab Dedicated is initially targeted at large enterprises and customers in highly-regulated industries. These customers want a SaaS solution but prefer not to use multi-tenant systems like GitLab.com due to strict security and compliance requirements or the desire to be on separate infrastructure to meet custom deployment needs. Additionally, our target segment is comfortable with a 2000 seat minimum order (otherwise Dedicated is cost prohibitive) and is willing to pay an additional fee on top of licenses for a GitLab instance to be hosted and managed on their behalf. Finally, our target segment has the flexibility to work with the launch timelines(GitLab internal) we've established.
GitLab Dedicated is for customers that need isolation from other tenants at the infrastructure level or need custom deployments of GitLab as discussed above. The main value proposition with Dedicated is that we're giving customers their own GitLab Instance, isolated from other tenants, and hosted as a SaaS service on the customer's behalf. With this extra value comes an additional management fee. Customers who want SaaS, but are OK with the shared-tenant model of .com or don't want to pay an extra fee should use gitlab.com. Availability will not be a point of differentiation between GitLab Dedicated and .com as both offerings target a 99.95% Availability SLA. Meanwhile, customers who want full control over their GitLab installation should use the self-managed option.
See below for a comparison of the different ways to deploy GitLab:
Overall, the main challenge our target customer has is maintaining an up-to-date GitLab instance that fulfills their security and compliance requirements. More granular customer needs are documented in the sections below.
Large enterprises demand strict uptime SLAs (at least 'three-nines') and expect the following capabilities related to system availability:
The main goal for FY23 is to make GitLab Dedicated available to external customers(GitLab internal). The initial version of the service will be fully automated, but will contain a minimal feature set(GitLab internal). After releasing the offering, we plan to deliver application features and operational capabilities that were not included in the first launch based on customer demand.
The product will be made available to customers over the course of the following milestones.
GitLab Dedicated was launched in Limited Availability (LA) with select customers at the end of Q1 FY23.
The goal of this phase is to be able to operate a small set of paid, production-level instances for select customers. Compared to Beta, Limited Availability delivers the availability, scalability, performance, security, and durability that customers need in a production environment. Note, many GitLab features will not be available at the start of Limited Availability. However, we do plan to slow roll some high-priority needs from our launch customers over the Limited Availability period. These are documented in the Roadmap here(GitLab internal).
In this phase, we plan to make the offering available to all customers who are willing to pay for it. Compared to LA, the focus in GA is on scaling the platform from a handful of early customers in specific geos to our broader customer base around the Globe. The full feature set for GA as well as the roadmap for Post GA is documented in this Epic(GitLab internal).
The current focus is to get to the General Availability phase, which requires scaling the service from a handful of customers to anyone that wants to use it. These requirements are captured in the Limited Availability roadmap Epic(GitLab internal).
The following links are internal to GitLab
When engaging with customers, we encourage everyone to be very intentional about when and how to mention GitLab Dedicated. This is a new deployment method which will take time to mature, and we do not want to disrupt prospective and existing customers by introducing Dedicated too early, or when it's a bad fit.
Prior to discussing GitLab Dedicated with an opportunity/customer:
* indicates Slot already filled by a customer
GitLab Dedicated creates a business opportunity for both GitLab and GitLab channel partners who offer hosted GitLab services. We are creating this offering to meet the needs of customers who want to consume hosted solutions directly from the DevOps vendor (in this case GitLab, Inc.) to more closely align operational and DevOps application needs. Customers who are interested in purchasing hosting services that include value-add managed services (for example, helping meet industry-specific specific requirements like HIPAA) would benefit from working with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Additionally, many customers have existing relationships with Channel Partners. Per the services ROE, these customers should continue consuming GitLab through their Channel Partner. By following the segmentation laid out above, we can minimize any disruption to existing channel-sourced ARR(GitLab internal).
With this effort, we also see an opportunity to grow the overall market for GitLab-hosted services through collaboration with partners. In the short-term we plan to enable MSP partners with design guidance and certifications so that they can offer better hosted GitLab solutions for their customers. We will work with the GitLab Channel Partner team to create a partner certification (available at GA) that will provide MSP partners with technical certifications, training, deployment and maintenance guidelines, and access to some of the same underlying tooling that powers GitLab Dedicated (e.g. GitLab Environment Toolkit and official Reference Architectures). We plan to keep the other underlying services (e.g. Switchboard and Amp) as well as the GitLab Dedicated branding proprietary to GitLab, Inc. Longer-term opportunities for consideration include enabling partners to resell GitLab Dedicated(GitLab internal). These partners would provide customers value-added services or integrated vendor stacks while the GitLab Dedicated team would still host the GitLab instance on behalf of the partner.
The pricing for GitLab Dedicated is comprised of the following components:
More details can be found this document (GitLab internal only). To see the total price of this offering for a specific customer based on their needs (e.g. number of licenses, storage, architecture size), please use the Pricing Calculator(GitLab internal). Before using it, first make a copy (File -> Make a Copy) so that your calculations don't interfere with others.
Per legal guidance, pricing details should not be shared with customers without first seeking approval from the GitLab Dedicated team.
The following items are not planned to be delivered at launch and are under consideration for the Post-GA timeframe:
This category is currently at the Minimal maturity level, and our next maturity target is Viable, which will be met when the service reaches the General Availability milestone.
The main competitor to Dedicated is GitHub AE, which offers a fully-managed GitHub Enterprise instance in the customer's desired region on Azure. Other competitors offering single-tenant, fully-managed devops solutions include AWS CodeCommit, Azure Devops, and GitLab Host.
This will be filled in during the Limited Availability period once we start receiving feedback from customers.
This will be filled in during the Limited Availability period once we start receiving feedback from customers.
This will be filled in during the Limited Availability period once we start receiving feedback from customers.