GitLab Geo

The solution for widely distributed development teams

Documentation

Overview

  • When development teams are spread across two or more geographical locations, but their GitLab instance is in a single location, fetching and cloning large repositories can take a long time.
  • Built for distributed teams, GitLab Geo allows for read-only mirrors of your GitLab instance. Reduce the time it takes to clone and fetch large repos and improve your collaboration process.

How it works

  • GitLab Geo is included in GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium.
  • GitLab Geo allows for read-only mirrors of your GitLab instance.
  • Project repositories and the database including user accounts, issues, merge requests, groups, project data, etc., are replicated on your secondary instance.
  • With read-only mirrors, your team can fetch projects and read data much faster while still pushing all changes to the primary server.
  • All replication operations are asynchronous and are queued to be dispatched as soon as they happen.
  • Explore Documentation

Features

  • Read-only secondaries: Maintain one primary GitLab instance while still enabling a read-only secondary instance for each of your distributed teams.
  • Authentication system hooks: The secondary instance receives all authentication data, like user accounts and logins, from the primary instance.
  • Intuitive UI: Secondaries utilize the same web interface your team has grown accustomed to. However, there are visual notifications that block write operations and make it clear that a user is on a secondary instance.

Benefits

  • Time: Reduce the time it takes your distributed developers to clone and fetch large repos and projects from minutes to seconds.
  • Collaboration: Enable all of your developers to contribute ideas and work in parallel from each of their respective geographies.
  • Scale: Balance the load between your primary and secondary instance or offload your automated tests to the Geo secondary node.

“We’ve seen a 20x speed increase since adopting GitLab Geo. Our primary code repository server is in Los Angeles. It was taking our Boston team 10 minutes to clone a single, large repo. Now with GitLab Geo, it takes under 30 seconds. The addition of GitLab Geo means our developers can be more productive.”

Corey Ramirez-Gomez
System Admin, Oblong

GitLab Geo saves you time. Watch the video below to learn how.

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