The Infrastructure Department enables GitLab (the company) to deliver a single DevOps application, and GitLab SaaS users to focus on generating value for their own businesses by ensuring that we operate an enterprise-grade SaaS platform.
The Infrastructure Department does this by focusing on availability, reliability, performance, and scalability efforts. These responsibilities have cost efficiency as an additional driving force, reinforced by the properly prioritized dogfooding efforts.
Many other teams also contribute to the success of the SaaS platform because GitLab.com is not a role. However, it is the responsibility of the Infrastructure Department to drive the ongoing evolution of the SaaS platform, enabled by platform observability data.
The Infrastructure Department operates a fast, secure, and reliable SaaS platform to which (and with which) everyone can contribute.
Integral part of this vision is to:
The direction is accomplished by using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Other strategic initiatives to achieve this vision are driven by the needs of enterprise customers looking to adopt GitLab.com. The GitLab.com strategy catalogs top customer requests for the SaaS offering and outlines strategic initiatves across both Infrastructure and Stage Groups needed to address these gaps.
Unlike typical companies, part of the mandates of our Security, Infrastructure, and Support Departments is to contribute to the development of the GitLab Product. This follows from these concepts, many of which are also behaviors attached to our core values:
As such, everyone in the department should be familiar with, and be acting upon, the following statements:
The Infrastructure Library contains documents that outline our thinking about the problems we are solving and represents the current state for any topic, playing a significant role in how we produce technical solutions to meet the challenges we face.
The Infrastructure department uses GitLab and GitLab features extensively as the main tool for operating many environments, including GitLab.com.
We follow the same dogfooding process as part of the Engineering function, while keeping the department mission statement as the primary prioritization driver. The prioritization process is aligned to the Engineering function level prioritization process which defines where the priority of dogfooding lies with regards to other technical decisions the Infrastructure department makes.
When we consider building tools to help us operate GitLab.com, we follow the 5x rule
to determine whether to build the tool as a feature in GitLab or outside of GitLab. To track Infrastructure's contributions back into the GitLab product, we tag those issues with the appropriate Dogfooding label.
At GitLab, we have a handbook first policy. It is how we communicate process changes, and how we build up a single source of truth for work that is being delivered every day.
The handbook usage page guide lists a number of general tips. Highlighting the ones that can be encountered most frequently in the Infrastructure department:
Classification of the Infrastructure department projects is described on the infrastructure department projects page.
The infrastructure issue tracker is the backlog and a catch-all project for the infrastructure teams and tracks the work our teams are doing–unrelated to an ongoing change or incident.
In addition to tracking the backlog, Infrastructure Department projects are captured in our Infrastructure Department Epic as well as in our Quarterly Objectives & Key Results
We have a model that we use to help us support product features. This model provides details on how we collaborate to ship new features to Production.
Infrastructure SREs may be aligned with stage groups as stable counterparts.
Stable Counterparts are used as a framework for managing reliable services at GitLab. The framework provides guidelines for collaboration between Stage Groups and Infrastructure Teams.
The Infrastructure department hires for a number of different technical specialisms and positions across its teams. This Infrastructure Interviewing Guide offers more detail on some of our regular openings, interview process and other useful information related to applying to jobs with us. More information on our current openings can be found on the careers page.
Join us for our interactive Infrastructure Office Hours call! This monthly gathering, held every second Tuesday of the month, provides a platform for open dialogue between the Infrastructure department and the rest of the company. Whether you have questions, suggestions, or insights to share, this call is an opportunity to collaborate and drive positive change. Everyone is invited to participate and discuss topics such as reliability engineering, incident management, observability, scalability, delivery and deployments, cloud costs, error budgeting, service-level objectives or any other infrastructure-related topics.
Check the Infrastructure calendar in Google Calendar for exact times. The agenda for the meeting is available in Google Docs.
The call is livestreamed onto the GitLab Unfiltered channel.
General Issue Trackers | General Slack Channels | Team Slack Channels | Resources |
---|---|---|---|
Infrastructure issue queue | #production | #g_delivery | Production Architecture |
Production incidents, and changes | #infrastructure-lounge | #g_scalability | Operational Runbooks |
Delivery | #incident-management | Environments | |
Scalability | #announcements | Monitoring | |
#feed_alerts-general | Readiness Reviews | ||
Infrastructure Standards |