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 combines the low overhead and efficiency of a SaaS platform with the flexibility and privacy benefits of self hosting. A single-tenant SaaS instance, fully managed and hosted by GitLab in any cloud region, is updated regularly to give you access to our latest product improvements — without the need to manage security, scalability, availability, and performance on your own. It's the offering of choice for enterprises and organizations in highly regulated industries that have complex regulatory, compliance, and data residency requirements. If you're a customer that's interested in Dedicated, make sure to also check-out the website for Dedicated.
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. GitLab Dedicated tenant operators (e.g. a system administrator) will retain the ability to quickly make changes to their Dedicated tenant's configurations in the course of their daily work using the Switchboard portal.
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.
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.
Note, this section does not reflect the list of currently available features within the GitLab Dedicated offering; rather, it contains the needs we're hearing from our customer base. The list of currently supported features in GitLab Dedicated is documented here: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/gitlab_dedicated/#available-features.
Large enterprises demand strict uptime SLAs (at least 'three-nines') and expect the following capabilities related to system availability:
In addition to customers looking to solve the above challenges, below are some additional characteristics of customers we are targeting with this offering:
Target Customer Characteristics
Characteristics
On GitLab Dedicated, customers are the administrators of their instance with full access to the Admin area of their tenant. This is different from GitLab.com, where administration is owned by the GitLab Infrastructure team.
Availability will not be a point of differentiation between GitLab Dedicated and GitLab.com as both offerings target a 99.95% Availability SLA.
See below for a comparison of the different ways to deploy GitLab:
Now that GitLab Dedicated has graduated from Limited Availability to General Availability, it can scale to meet the expected customer demand of the service. Customers who want a production-quality GitLab Dedicated instance and are willing to pay for it can now get one.
Next, we plan to focus on improving the onboarding and configuration management experiences by delivering the Switchboard management console. Additionally, we plan to add several highly requested features that were deferred in the lead up to GA. See the roadmap section below for more details.
Because Dedicated is a SaaS offering, we prioritize "Keep the lights on" activities (e.g. operating customer environments, tech debt, and corrective actions) above all else to ensure we provide customers a high level of service that continually meets our reliability and performance SLAs. Next, we prioritize security enhancements (e.g. supporting new compliance certifications) since our customer base comprises of large enterprises with strict compliance requirements, followed by initiatives to improve our automation and scaling of the system (including Switchboard), enhancements to our overall system SLAs (uptime, rto/rpo targets, etc), customer feature requests, and then, finally, config changes to customer environments.
When it comes to customer feature requests, we prioritize features that will benefit the most customers. As a result, we will not build any custom capabilities or one-off features for individual customers. This includes not making modifications to individual tenants. Feature requests that meet our prioritization criteria but are not currently on the roadmap will be slotted in after other committed roadmap items have been delivered.
| Priority | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | KTLO - On Call | Operating Tenant Production Environments |
| 1 | Security/Compliance | Attain security and third party compliance certifications and addressing findings from audits |
| 2 | Automation | Reduce toil required to operate GitLab Dedicated platform including Switchboard (management portal for customer admins) MVC, automated restore, and Automated Version Management |
| 3 | Reliability | Improve SLAs - Availability, RTO, RPO, Geo, disaster recovery, failover testing |
| 4 | Customer Feature Requests | Delivering new customer-facing platform capabilities as well as enabling GitLab functionality such as Pages, advanced search, reply-by email, service desk |
| 5 | Customer Configuration Changes | Customers will need config changes during onboarding and weekly maintenance windows. |
Please see list of Available Features in our documentation.
Please see list of Features that are not available in our documentation. While the most requested of these have been incorporated into the roadmap below, we are not currently focused on delivering the other features mentioned in that list. These will be considered for next year based on customer demand.
The key capabilities we plan to deliver in Environment Automation for the second half of FY24 are summarized below. The roadmap for Switchboard can be found on the Switchboard Direction Page
Post Q4, we will prioritize features from the list of what is not currently planned based on customer demand.
GitLab AI features improve DevSecOps workflow efficiency and velocity by applying AI assisted workflows to all teams involved in delivering software value.
As a cloud-based Saas service, GitLab Dedicated is a natural fit to deliver cloud-based AI services to customers. However, as a single-tenant service we need to design a solution that maintains single-tenancy and does not compromise on customer compliance requirements like data residency and isolation, and predictability.
Short term, our goal is to bring AI features to GitLab Dedicated starting with Code Suggestions, followed by Suggested Reviewers. That effort can be tracked via this epic.
Long term, our vision is to design native AI capbilities for single-tenant SaaS deployments. This may include training models inside tenant environments to generate tailored insights and suggestions while keeping data private. This will allow enterprises and regulated industries to more easily adopt AI-assisted workflows while maintaining compliance requirements around data residency, privacy, and isolation.
While we don't have any specific timelines to share for bringing all AI features to GitLab Dedicated at this time, as these features become Generally Available, we will be working on a plan to enable them in GitLab Dedicated.
GitLab strives to maintain parity between self-managed and SaaS. This can be challenging for certain features, like AI. From a Dedicated perspective, we adhere to the following principles:
Due to the number of requests we have been receiving from the field to have conversations with Dedicated prospects, we are now asking account teams (Sales leads and SAs) to give the initial pitch of Dedicated to their customers using the materials on the Dedicated Page in Highspot. This allows the Product team to spend more time supporting Dedicated deals that are further along in the sales cycle.
#f_gitlab_dedicated channel so that they can help address these questions.#f_gitlab_dedicated channel requesting a review. Also provide the SFDC link for this opportunity.Note: you must receive approval from the Dedicated Product team before sharing any pricing numbers with the customer and before creating a formal quote via Salesforce
We have the following public facing pages available for those interested in learning more:
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 (GitLab Internal) 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 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:
We've priced GitLab Dedicated to align with likely buyers based on minimums and the complexities of their deployments. As mentioned above, the pricing for GitLab Dedicated is comprised of the following components: the cost for Ultimate Licenses, plus additional fees for instance infrastructure & management, the amount of storage needed, and the customer's infrastructure size (e.g. S, M, L, XL, XXL). As we scale and introduce GitLab Dedicated to more and more customer cohorts we'll share further details on pricing options.
The main competitor to GitLab 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.