[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":822},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public":3,"navigation-en-us":39,"banner-en-us":450,"footer-en-us":460,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Sid Sijbrandij":699,"blog-related-posts-en-us-gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public":717,"blog-promotions-en-us":760,"next-steps-en-us":812},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"authors":8,"body":10,"category":11,"categorySlug":11,"config":12,"content":16,"date":20,"description":17,"extension":24,"externalUrl":25,"featured":14,"heroImage":19,"isFeatured":14,"meta":26,"navigation":27,"path":28,"publishedDate":20,"rawbody":29,"seo":30,"slug":13,"stem":34,"tagSlugs":35,"tags":37,"template":15,"updatedDate":25,"__hash__":38},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public.yml","GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public",[7],"sid-sijbrandij",[9],"Sid Sijbrandij","\nToday, GitLab Inc. announced the next milestone in our journey as we become a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Global Market (NASDAQ: GTLB). GitLab was the first company to publicly live stream the entire end-to-end listing day at Nasdaq. \n\nIn a world where software defines the speed of innovation, every company must become a software company or they’ll be disrupted by a software company. We believe that GitLab, the DevOps Platform, helps companies to deliver software faster and more efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. And it all happens inside our single platform where engineering, security, and operations teams can collaborate together. \n\nIn my [Founder’s Letter](#foundersletter), which you can read below, I told GitLab’s origin story. GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine. In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab Inc. in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.\n\nTo ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up joining the company. Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, which Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view and the results were far better than anyone expected. The single application was easier to understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across functions. We had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps platform and proceeded to build it out. \n\nToday, we believe that GitLab is the leading DevOps platform with an estimated 30 million registered users. GitLab's mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors, and we greatly increase the rate of innovation. \n\n“GitLab also has more than 2,600 contributors in its open source community, which it lists as a competitive strength” - Stephanie Condon, ZDNet*\n\nWe are making progress toward our mission by elevating others through knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform.\n\nGitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past, present, and future success. Most companies regress to the mean and slow down over time. We plan to maintain our startup ethos by continuing to do the following:\n\n- Reinforcing our values\n- Making quick, informed decisions\n- Designating a directly responsible individual (DRI) to own decision making for a workstream or initiative\n- Organizing informal communications\n- Challenging conventions and using boring solutions\n- Having a bias for action\n- Remembering we are an organization, not a family\n- Having time based releases\n- Supporting individual innovation through coaches and incubation\n- Dogfooding\n\nWe believe our approach has an impact on not only our business, but the industry as a whole. And we are not the only ones. \n\n“There are few companies that have had as positive an impact on the culture of an industry as @gitlab has.” - James Wise, Partner, Balderton on Twitter\n\nFrom day 1, we have co-created with the wider GitLab community, and together we have advanced the DevOps Platform. I am excited to keep building to make GitLab’s “everyone can contribute” mission a reality.\n\n## \u003Ca name=\"foundersletter\">\u003C/a> Founder’s Letter from the GitLab S-1\n\n## Letter From Our CEO\n\n**Origins**\n\nGitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in Ukraine. \n\nIn 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.\n\n**DevOps Platform**\n\nTo ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up joining the company.\n\nWhen Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with him. Dmitriy felt that the applications were already integrated as well as two separate applications could be. And I believed that customers wanted to mix and match solutions. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view once we realized that combining the two applications would lead to greater efficiency for our team members and our users.\n\nThe results were far better than anyone expected. A single application was easier to understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across functions. We had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps platform and proceeded to build it out. Kamil’s advocacy inspired GitLab’s “disagree, commit, and disagree'' sub-value. We allow GitLab team members to question decisions even after they are made. However, team members are required to achieve results on every decision while it stands, even while they are trying to have it changed.\n\n**Mission**\n\nGitLab's mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become contributors, and we greatly increase the rate of innovation. We are making progress toward our mission by elevating others through knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform. We promote knowledge sharing through publishing how we operate in our handbook, an online repository of how we run the company that now totals more than 2,000 webpages. The lessons we have learned and put in the handbook are available to anyone with an internet connection. We contribute to job access by helping people with their tech careers and educating the world on remote work best practices. We believe that remote work is spreading job access more evenly across regions and countries. Our software platform brings together development, operations, and security professionals and makes it faster and more secure for them to innovate together.\n\n**Stewardship**\n\nMost of the time, when a company starts commercializing an open source software project, the wider community around the project shrinks. This has not been the case with GitLab. The wider community around GitLab is still growing. We are proud that GitLab is a co-creation of GitLab team members and users. We have ten stewardship promises that commit us to balancing the need to generate revenue with the needs of the open source project and the wider community. In our first year, we received just over 300 code contributions. Now, we frequently exceed this number in a single month.\n\n**Values**\n\nFrom the beginning of GitLab, we have been all-remote as the initial team members lived in the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Serbia. GitLab was founded before remote work was a proven model, so investors were worried about our ability to effectively manage the business and scale. That early skepticism required us to establish explicit mechanisms for value reinforcement. We now have over 20 mechanisms listed in our handbook. Some reinforcements are small. For example, team members have access to a Zoom background that showcases each of our values as icons. Others are more substantial. For example, every team member’s promotion document is structured around our values and shared with the entire company.\n\nGitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past, present, and future success. These values are:\n\n1. Results - This is the most important value in our values hierarchy as strong results enable us to keep doing the right things. If we have strong business momentum, we can continue to invest toward our ambitious, long-term mission. We care about what is achieved, not the hours worked. Since you get what you measure and reward, we do not encourage long hours and instead focus on results. For example, to discourage team members from focusing on hours worked, team members are discouraged from publicly thanking others for working long hours or late nights. This is intended to prevent pressure to work longer hours or highlighting longer hours as something that is rewarded.\n2. Collaboration - Team members must work effectively with others to achieve results. To encourage collaboration, we have about four group conversations per week. These are meetings in which departments at GitLab share their results with team members throughout the company. Group conversations enable all team members to understand and question every part of the business. This access to information and context supports collaboration.\n3. Efficiency - Working efficiently enables us to make fast progress, which makes work more fulfilling. For example, we only hold meetings when topics need to be discussed synchronously. When we do have a meeting, we share the discussion topics, the slide deck, and sometimes a recording of someone presenting the slide deck beforehand. This way we can dedicate the synchronous time of the meeting to discussion, not team members presenting material. We also have speedy meetings that are short, start on time, and end at least five minutes before the next one begins. We encourage team members to work together in public chat channels as much as possible instead of through direct messages. This makes information readily available to anyone who is interested or may become interested at a future point.\n4. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) - We believe that team member diversity leads to better decisions and a greater sense of team member belonging. We spend more money than the industry average per hire to ensure we approach a diverse set of candidates. We have a DIB Program which includes Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs), voluntary, team member-led groups, focused on fostering DIB within GitLab. I'm proud of team member driven initiatives such as mentoring for an advanced software engineering course at Morehouse College, a historically Black liberal arts school. We also do Reverse Ask Me Anything, meetings in which I ask questions of Team Member Resource Groups and get to learn from their experiences. We try to work asynchronously as much as possible to not be dependent on time zone overlap. This enables us to hire and work with people around the world from different cultures and backgrounds.\n5. Iteration - By reducing the scope of deliverables, we are able to complete them earlier and get faster feedback. Faster feedback gives us valuable information that guides what we do next. We measure and set targets for how many changes are expected from each engineering team. This encourages teams to reduce the scope of what they build and ship changes in smaller increments. We know that smaller changes are easier to review and less risky. The end result is that we are able to get more done as the higher frequency of changes more than compensates for the smaller size of them. We release features and categories even when they are minimally viable. We do not wait for perfection when we can offer something of value, get feedback, and allow others to contribute to features by refining and expanding upon them.\n6. Transparency - By making information public, we can reduce the threshold to contribute and make collaboration easier. In addition to our publicly shared handbook, we also livestream and share recordings of some of our meetings. I have CEO Shadows who attend all my GitLab meetings during a two week rotation. We are public about our strategy, risks, and product direction.\n\nThese are living values that are updated over time. In 2020 alone, we made 329 improvements to the GitLab Values page of our handbook.\n\n**Still a Startup**\n\nMost companies regress to the mean and slow down over time. We plan to maintain our startup ethos by doing the following:\n\n1. **Reinforcing our values**: We have more than 20 documented ways to reinforce GitLab’s values. Since hiring, bonuses, and promotions provide strong signals of what is valued and rewarded, we make values the lens through which we evaluate team member fit and advancement.\n2. **Quick and informed decisions**: We are able to combine the advantages of consensus organizations and hierarchical organizations by splitting decisions into two phases. In the data gathering phase, we employ the best of consensus organizations as we encourage people to contribute their ideas and opinions. In the decision phase, we benefit from the best of hierarchical organizations with one person, the directly responsible individual, deciding what to do without having to convince the people who made suggestions.\n3. **A directly responsible individual (DRI)**: A DRI is a single person who owns decision making authority and responsibility for the success of a given workstream or initiative. We avoid confusion and empower team members by being clear about the DRI. With a few documented exceptions, the person who does the work resulting from the decision gets to make the decision. DRIs tend to have the context required for good decision making and are empowered by their ability to use their own judgement in doing what is best for the business.\n4. **Organize informal communications**: Informal team member communications, such as a chat about life outside of work, are necessary for building trust. Trust is essential for great business results. Many businesses invest heavily in offices and facilities, because they believe offices are necessary for informal communication.\n\nDuring the pandemic, many businesses that were forced to work remotely discovered that productivity increased. Many of these same businesses are now making plans to return to the office. One reason being given for the return to the office is that not everyone can work from home. We solve this by allowing people to rent work space. The other main reason given is that people miss working from a central office with co-workers. I don’t think that people miss the commute or the office furniture. They miss informal communication. Central offices are a really expensive, inconvenient, and indirect way to facilitate information communication. It is more efficient to directly organize informal communication.\n\nFor example, every person who joins GitLab has to schedule at least five coffee chats during their onboarding. We also have social calls, Ask Me Anything meetings with senior leaders, and 15 other explicit ways to encourage employee connections and relationship building. Intentionally organizing informal communication enables the trust-building conversations that are essential for collaboration. This can be more effective than relying on chance encounters in an office building. You can connect with team members throughout the world and across departments through a coffee chat. You may not meet people outside of your own floor in an office setting.\n\n5. **Challenge conventions**: We do not do things differently for the sake of being different, and we use boring solutions whenever possible. That said, we're also willing to deviate from conventions when it can benefit GitLab and the wider community. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe GitLab was the largest all-remote company in the world. We now teach others how to succeed as remote companies and employees. We aim to be the most transparent company of our size. This transparency has had demonstrable benefits ranging from increased team member productivity to enhanced brand awareness. What some saw as a liability, we have shown to be a strength.\n6. **Bias for action**: Decisions should be thoughtful, but delivering fast results requires the fearless acceptance of occasionally making mistakes. Our bias for action may result in the occasional mistake, but it also allows us to course correct quickly. We keep the stakes low for mistakes for the sake of transparency. When people are comfortable communicating missteps, risk aversion and secrecy don’t become the norm.\n7. **Not a family**: Some companies talk about being a 'Family.' We don't think that is the right perspective. At GitLab, the relationship is not the end goal. The goal is results. We are clear about accountability and hold people to a clearly articulated standard. When people do not perform, we try to help them improve. If they still can’t meet expectations, we let them go.\n8. **Time based release**: We have introduced a new, enhanced version of our software on the 22nd of every month for over nine years. A time based release ensures that when a feature is ready, its release will not be held up by another that is not. Aligned with our value of iteration, we try to reduce the scope of each feature so that it fits in a single release.\n9. **Individual innovation**: We empower individuals to innovate. For example, we have designated coaches who support contributors from the wider community in getting their contributions to the point where they can be merged by GitLab. We also have an incubation department dedicated to quickly turning ideas into viable features and products.\n10. **Dogfooding**: The best way to quickly improve GitLab is to use it ourselves, or dogfood it, so that we have a quick feedback loop. We use our own product even when a feature is in its early stages of development. This helps us to develop empathy with users and better understand what to build next.\n\n## Long-Term Focus\n\nMore than 40 million software professionals are driving change through software, and this number is growing. These software professionals are rapidly adopting DevOps to accelerate this change. Gartner predicts that by 2023, 40% of organizations will have switched from multiple point solutions to DevOps value stream delivery platforms to streamline application delivery, versus less than 10% in 2020. I believe that 40% is just the beginning, and almost all organizations will eventually use a DevOps Platform. GitLab has a unique opportunity to lead the DevOps Platform market and shape innovation.\nWith a large addressable market, GitLab plans to optimize for long term growth--even if it comes at the expense of short-term profitability. This means that we may not make a profit for a long time as we need to weigh profitability against the clear opportunity to pursue larger, future returns.\n\n## Closing\n\nWith the wider GitLab community, we have created and advanced the DevOps Platform. I am excited to keep building to make GitLab’s “everyone can contribute” mission a reality. I look forward to welcoming investors who share our enthusiasm for collaboration and innovation.\n\n* 2,600 contributors as of July 31, 2021\n","devsecops",{"slug":13,"featured":14,"template":15},"gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public",false,"BlogPost",{"title":5,"description":17,"authors":18,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":10,"category":11,"tags":21},"Today is the day GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public.",[9],"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663397/Blog/Hero%20Images/logoforblogpost.jpg","2021-10-14",[22,23],"news","DevOps","yml",null,{},true,"/en-us/blog/gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public","seo:\n  title: GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public\n  description: Today is the day GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public.\n  ogTitle: GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public\n  ogDescription: Today is the day GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public.\n  noIndex: false\n  ogImage: >-\n    https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663397/Blog/Hero%20Images/logoforblogpost.jpg\n  ogUrl: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public\n  ogSiteName: https://about.gitlab.com\n  ogType: article\n  canonicalUrls: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public\ncontent:\n  title: GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public\n  description: Today is the day GitLab Inc. takes The DevOps Platform public.\n  authors:\n    - Sid Sijbrandij\n  heroImage: >-\n    https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663397/Blog/Hero%20Images/logoforblogpost.jpg\n  date: '2021-10-14'\n  body: >\n\n    Today, GitLab Inc. announced the next milestone in our journey as we become\n    a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq Global Market (NASDAQ: GTLB). GitLab\n    was the first company to publicly live stream the entire end-to-end listing\n    day at Nasdaq. \n\n\n    In a world where software defines the speed of innovation, every company\n    must become a software company or they’ll be disrupted by a software\n    company. We believe that GitLab, the DevOps Platform, helps companies to\n    deliver software faster and more efficiently, while strengthening security\n    and compliance. And it all happens inside our single platform where\n    engineering, security, and operations teams can collaborate together. \n\n\n    In my [Founder’s Letter](#foundersletter), which you can read below, I told\n    GitLab’s origin story. GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or\n    Bay Area apartment. In 2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created\n    GitLab from his house in Ukraine. In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home\n    in the Netherlands on a tech news site. I thought that it was natural that a\n    collaboration tool for developers was open source so people could contribute\n    to it. As a Ruby developer, I was impressed by GitLab’s code quality,\n    especially since it absorbed more than 300 contributions in the first year.\n    In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would like to work on GitLab full-time.\n    After reading that tweet, I approached him, and we partnered so he could\n    work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated GitLab Inc. in 2014 and applied to\n    Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in Silicon Valley. In 2015, we\n    participated in their program, and this greatly accelerated our business.\n\n\n    To ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second\n    application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil\n    Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of\n    the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and\n    I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up\n    joining the company. Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, which\n    Dimitriy and I initially disagreed with. Thankfully, Kamil persisted in\n    arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single application.\n    Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view and the results were far\n    better than anyone expected. The single application was easier to\n    understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across functions. We\n    had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps platform and\n    proceeded to build it out. \n\n\n    Today, we believe that GitLab is the leading DevOps platform with an\n    estimated 30 million registered users. GitLab's mission is to ensure that\n    everyone can contribute. When everyone can contribute, users become\n    contributors, and we greatly increase the rate of innovation. \n\n\n    “GitLab also has more than 2,600 contributors in its open source community,\n    which it lists as a competitive strength” - Stephanie Condon, ZDNet*\n\n\n    We are making progress toward our mission by elevating others through\n    knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform.\n\n\n    GitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past,\n    present, and future success. Most companies regress to the mean and slow\n    down over time. We plan to maintain our startup ethos by continuing to do\n    the following:\n\n\n    - Reinforcing our values\n\n    - Making quick, informed decisions\n\n    - Designating a directly responsible individual (DRI) to own decision making\n    for a workstream or initiative\n\n    - Organizing informal communications\n\n    - Challenging conventions and using boring solutions\n\n    - Having a bias for action\n\n    - Remembering we are an organization, not a family\n\n    - Having time based releases\n\n    - Supporting individual innovation through coaches and incubation\n\n    - Dogfooding\n\n\n    We believe our approach has an impact on not only our business, but the\n    industry as a whole. And we are not the only ones. \n\n\n    “There are few companies that have had as positive an impact on the culture\n    of an industry as @gitlab has.” - James Wise, Partner, Balderton on Twitter\n\n\n    From day 1, we have co-created with the wider GitLab community, and together\n    we have advanced the DevOps Platform. I am excited to keep building to make\n    GitLab’s “everyone can contribute” mission a reality.\n\n\n    ## \u003Ca name=\"foundersletter\">\u003C/a> Founder’s Letter from the GitLab S-1\n\n\n    ## Letter From Our CEO\n\n\n    **Origins**\n\n\n    GitLab did not start in a tech incubator, garage, or Bay Area apartment. In\n    2011, my co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, created GitLab from his house in\n    Ukraine. \n\n\n    In 2012, I discovered GitLab from my home in the Netherlands on a tech news\n    site. I thought that it was natural that a collaboration tool for developers\n    was open source so people could contribute to it. As a Ruby developer, I was\n    impressed by GitLab’s code quality, especially since it absorbed more than\n    300 contributions in the first year. In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted that he would\n    like to work on GitLab full-time. After reading that tweet, I approached\n    him, and we partnered so he could work on GitLab full-time. We incorporated\n    GitLab in 2014 and applied to Y Combinator, a technology accelerator in\n    Silicon Valley. In 2015, we participated in their program, and this greatly\n    accelerated our business.\n\n\n    **DevOps Platform**\n\n\n    To ensure the quality of the GitLab application, Dmitriy built a second\n    application, GitLab CI, to automatically test our code. In 2015, Kamil\n    Trzciński, a member of the wider community, contributed a better version of\n    the GitLab CI application so that it could run jobs in parallel. Dmitriy and\n    I quickly made this new Runner the default version, and Kamil ended up\n    joining the company.\n\n\n    When Kamil proposed integrating the two applications, Dimitriy and I\n    initially disagreed with him. Dmitriy felt that the applications were\n    already integrated as well as two separate applications could be. And I\n    believed that customers wanted to mix and match solutions. Thankfully, Kamil\n    persisted in arguing for combining GitLab and GitLab CI into a single\n    application. Dmitriy and I came around to Kamil’s point of view once we\n    realized that combining the two applications would lead to greater\n    efficiency for our team members and our users.\n\n\n    The results were far better than anyone expected. A single application was\n    easier to understand, faster to use, and enabled collaboration across\n    functions. We had invented what we believed to be the first true DevOps\n    platform and proceeded to build it out. Kamil’s advocacy inspired GitLab’s\n    “disagree, commit, and disagree'' sub-value. We allow GitLab team members to\n    question decisions even after they are made. However, team members are\n    required to achieve results on every decision while it stands, even while\n    they are trying to have it changed.\n\n\n    **Mission**\n\n\n    GitLab's mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute. When everyone\n    can contribute, users become contributors, and we greatly increase the rate\n    of innovation. We are making progress toward our mission by elevating others\n    through knowledge sharing, job access, and our software platform. We promote\n    knowledge sharing through publishing how we operate in our handbook, an\n    online repository of how we run the company that now totals more than 2,000\n    webpages. The lessons we have learned and put in the handbook are available\n    to anyone with an internet connection. We contribute to job access by\n    helping people with their tech careers and educating the world on remote\n    work best practices. We believe that remote work is spreading job access\n    more evenly across regions and countries. Our software platform brings\n    together development, operations, and security professionals and makes it\n    faster and more secure for them to innovate together.\n\n\n    **Stewardship**\n\n\n    Most of the time, when a company starts commercializing an open source\n    software project, the wider community around the project shrinks. This has\n    not been the case with GitLab. The wider community around GitLab is still\n    growing. We are proud that GitLab is a co-creation of GitLab team members\n    and users. We have ten stewardship promises that commit us to balancing the\n    need to generate revenue with the needs of the open source project and the\n    wider community. In our first year, we received just over 300 code\n    contributions. Now, we frequently exceed this number in a single month.\n\n\n    **Values**\n\n\n    From the beginning of GitLab, we have been all-remote as the initial team\n    members lived in the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Serbia. GitLab was founded\n    before remote work was a proven model, so investors were worried about our\n    ability to effectively manage the business and scale. That early skepticism\n    required us to establish explicit mechanisms for value reinforcement. We now\n    have over 20 mechanisms listed in our handbook. Some reinforcements are\n    small. For example, team members have access to a Zoom background that\n    showcases each of our values as icons. Others are more substantial. For\n    example, every team member’s promotion document is structured around our\n    values and shared with the entire company.\n\n\n    GitLab’s values and underlying operational principles are core to our past,\n    present, and future success. These values are:\n\n\n    1. Results - This is the most important value in our values hierarchy as\n    strong results enable us to keep doing the right things. If we have strong\n    business momentum, we can continue to invest toward our ambitious, long-term\n    mission. We care about what is achieved, not the hours worked. Since you get\n    what you measure and reward, we do not encourage long hours and instead\n    focus on results. For example, to discourage team members from focusing on\n    hours worked, team members are discouraged from publicly thanking others for\n    working long hours or late nights. This is intended to prevent pressure to\n    work longer hours or highlighting longer hours as something that is\n    rewarded.\n\n    2. Collaboration - Team members must work effectively with others to achieve\n    results. To encourage collaboration, we have about four group conversations\n    per week. These are meetings in which departments at GitLab share their\n    results with team members throughout the company. Group conversations enable\n    all team members to understand and question every part of the business. This\n    access to information and context supports collaboration.\n\n    3. Efficiency - Working efficiently enables us to make fast progress, which\n    makes work more fulfilling. For example, we only hold meetings when topics\n    need to be discussed synchronously. When we do have a meeting, we share the\n    discussion topics, the slide deck, and sometimes a recording of someone\n    presenting the slide deck beforehand. This way we can dedicate the\n    synchronous time of the meeting to discussion, not team members presenting\n    material. We also have speedy meetings that are short, start on time, and\n    end at least five minutes before the next one begins. We encourage team\n    members to work together in public chat channels as much as possible instead\n    of through direct messages. This makes information readily available to\n    anyone who is interested or may become interested at a future point.\n\n    4. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) - We believe that team member\n    diversity leads to better decisions and a greater sense of team member\n    belonging. We spend more money than the industry average per hire to ensure\n    we approach a diverse set of candidates. We have a DIB Program which\n    includes Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs), voluntary, team member-led\n    groups, focused on fostering DIB within GitLab. I'm proud of team member\n    driven initiatives such as mentoring for an advanced software engineering\n    course at Morehouse College, a historically Black liberal arts school. We\n    also do Reverse Ask Me Anything, meetings in which I ask questions of Team\n    Member Resource Groups and get to learn from their experiences. We try to\n    work asynchronously as much as possible to not be dependent on time zone\n    overlap. This enables us to hire and work with people around the world from\n    different cultures and backgrounds.\n\n    5. Iteration - By reducing the scope of deliverables, we are able to\n    complete them earlier and get faster feedback. Faster feedback gives us\n    valuable information that guides what we do next. We measure and set targets\n    for how many changes are expected from each engineering team. This\n    encourages teams to reduce the scope of what they build and ship changes in\n    smaller increments. We know that smaller changes are easier to review and\n    less risky. The end result is that we are able to get more done as the\n    higher frequency of changes more than compensates for the smaller size of\n    them. We release features and categories even when they are minimally\n    viable. We do not wait for perfection when we can offer something of value,\n    get feedback, and allow others to contribute to features by refining and\n    expanding upon them.\n\n    6. Transparency - By making information public, we can reduce the threshold\n    to contribute and make collaboration easier. In addition to our publicly\n    shared handbook, we also livestream and share recordings of some of our\n    meetings. I have CEO Shadows who attend all my GitLab meetings during a two\n    week rotation. We are public about our strategy, risks, and product\n    direction.\n\n\n    These are living values that are updated over time. In 2020 alone, we made\n    329 improvements to the GitLab Values page of our handbook.\n\n\n    **Still a Startup**\n\n\n    Most companies regress to the mean and slow down over time. We plan to\n    maintain our startup ethos by doing the following:\n\n\n    1. **Reinforcing our values**: We have more than 20 documented ways to\n    reinforce GitLab’s values. Since hiring, bonuses, and promotions provide\n    strong signals of what is valued and rewarded, we make values the lens\n    through which we evaluate team member fit and advancement.\n\n    2. **Quick and informed decisions**: We are able to combine the advantages\n    of consensus organizations and hierarchical organizations by splitting\n    decisions into two phases. In the data gathering phase, we employ the best\n    of consensus organizations as we encourage people to contribute their ideas\n    and opinions. In the decision phase, we benefit from the best of\n    hierarchical organizations with one person, the directly responsible\n    individual, deciding what to do without having to convince the people who\n    made suggestions.\n\n    3. **A directly responsible individual (DRI)**: A DRI is a single person who\n    owns decision making authority and responsibility for the success of a given\n    workstream or initiative. We avoid confusion and empower team members by\n    being clear about the DRI. With a few documented exceptions, the person who\n    does the work resulting from the decision gets to make the decision. DRIs\n    tend to have the context required for good decision making and are empowered\n    by their ability to use their own judgement in doing what is best for the\n    business.\n\n    4. **Organize informal communications**: Informal team member\n    communications, such as a chat about life outside of work, are necessary for\n    building trust. Trust is essential for great business results. Many\n    businesses invest heavily in offices and facilities, because they believe\n    offices are necessary for informal communication.\n\n\n    During the pandemic, many businesses that were forced to work remotely\n    discovered that productivity increased. Many of these same businesses are\n    now making plans to return to the office. One reason being given for the\n    return to the office is that not everyone can work from home. We solve this\n    by allowing people to rent work space. The other main reason given is that\n    people miss working from a central office with co-workers. I don’t think\n    that people miss the commute or the office furniture. They miss informal\n    communication. Central offices are a really expensive, inconvenient, and\n    indirect way to facilitate information communication. It is more efficient\n    to directly organize informal communication.\n\n\n    For example, every person who joins GitLab has to schedule at least five\n    coffee chats during their onboarding. We also have social calls, Ask Me\n    Anything meetings with senior leaders, and 15 other explicit ways to\n    encourage employee connections and relationship building. Intentionally\n    organizing informal communication enables the trust-building conversations\n    that are essential for collaboration. This can be more effective than\n    relying on chance encounters in an office building. You can connect with\n    team members throughout the world and across departments through a coffee\n    chat. You may not meet people outside of your own floor in an office\n    setting.\n\n\n    5. **Challenge conventions**: We do not do things differently for the sake\n    of being different, and we use boring solutions whenever possible. That\n    said, we're also willing to deviate from conventions when it can benefit\n    GitLab and the wider community. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe\n    GitLab was the largest all-remote company in the world. We now teach others\n    how to succeed as remote companies and employees. We aim to be the most\n    transparent company of our size. This transparency has had demonstrable\n    benefits ranging from increased team member productivity to enhanced brand\n    awareness. What some saw as a liability, we have shown to be a strength.\n\n    6. **Bias for action**: Decisions should be thoughtful, but delivering fast\n    results requires the fearless acceptance of occasionally making mistakes.\n    Our bias for action may result in the occasional mistake, but it also allows\n    us to course correct quickly. We keep the stakes low for mistakes for the\n    sake of transparency. When people are comfortable communicating missteps,\n    risk aversion and secrecy don’t become the norm.\n\n    7. **Not a family**: Some companies talk about being a 'Family.' We don't\n    think that is the right perspective. At GitLab, the relationship is not the\n    end goal. The goal is results. We are clear about accountability and hold\n    people to a clearly articulated standard. When people do not perform, we try\n    to help them improve. If they still can’t meet expectations, we let them go.\n\n    8. **Time based release**: We have introduced a new, enhanced version of our\n    software on the 22nd of every month for over nine years. A time based\n    release ensures that when a feature is ready, its release will not be held\n    up by another that is not. Aligned with our value of iteration, we try to\n    reduce the scope of each feature so that it fits in a single release.\n\n    9. **Individual innovation**: We empower individuals to innovate. For\n    example, we have designated coaches who support contributors from the wider\n    community in getting their contributions to the point where they can be\n    merged by GitLab. We also have an incubation department dedicated to quickly\n    turning ideas into viable features and products.\n\n    10. **Dogfooding**: The best way to quickly improve GitLab is to use it\n    ourselves, or dogfood it, so that we have a quick feedback loop. We use our\n    own product even when a feature is in its early stages of development. This\n    helps us to develop empathy with users and better understand what to build\n    next.\n\n\n    ## Long-Term Focus\n\n\n    More than 40 million software professionals are driving change through\n    software, and this number is growing. These software professionals are\n    rapidly adopting DevOps to accelerate this change. Gartner predicts that by\n    2023, 40% of organizations will have switched from multiple point solutions\n    to DevOps value stream delivery platforms to streamline application\n    delivery, versus less than 10% in 2020. I believe that 40% is just the\n    beginning, and almost all organizations will eventually use a DevOps\n    Platform. GitLab has a unique opportunity to lead the DevOps Platform market\n    and shape innovation.\n\n    With a large addressable market, GitLab plans to optimize for long term\n    growth--even if it comes at the expense of short-term profitability. This\n    means that we may not make a profit for a long time as we need to weigh\n    profitability against the clear opportunity to pursue larger, future\n    returns.\n\n\n    ## Closing\n\n\n    With the wider GitLab community, we have created and advanced the DevOps\n    Platform. I am excited to keep building to make GitLab’s “everyone can\n    contribute” mission a reality. 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statement",{"items":689},[690,693,696],{"text":691,"config":692},"Terms",{"href":520,"dataGaName":521,"dataGaLocation":468},{"text":694,"config":695},"Cookies",{"dataGaName":530,"dataGaLocation":468,"id":531,"isOneTrustButton":27},{"text":697,"config":698},"Privacy",{"href":525,"dataGaName":526,"dataGaLocation":468},[700],{"id":701,"title":9,"body":25,"config":702,"content":704,"description":25,"extension":24,"meta":712,"navigation":27,"path":713,"seo":714,"stem":715,"__hash__":716},"blogAuthors/en-us/blog/authors/sid-sijbrandij.yml",{"template":703},"BlogAuthor",{"role":705,"name":9,"bio":706,"config":707},"Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer and Board Chair of GitLab Inc.","Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced see-brandy) is the Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer and Board Chair of GitLab Inc., the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform. GitLab's single application helps organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently while strengthening their security and compliance.\n\nSid's career path has been anything but traditional. He spent four years building recreational submarines for U-Boat Worx and while at Ministerie van Justitie en Veiligheid he worked on the Legis project, which developed several innovative web applications to aid lawmaking. He first saw Ruby code in 2007 and loved it so much that he taught himself how to program. In 2012, as a Ruby programmer, he encountered GitLab and discovered his passion for open source. Soon after, Sid commercialized GitLab, and by 2015 he led the company through Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch. Under his leadership, the company has grown with an estimated 30 million+ registered users from startups to global enterprises.\n\nSid studied at the University of Twente in the Netherlands where he received an M.S. in Management Science. Sid was named one of the greatest minds of the pandemic by Forbes for spreading the gospel of remote work.",{"headshot":708,"twitter":709,"linkedin":710,"ctfId":711},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749665383/Blog/Author%20Headshots/sytses-headshot.png","https://twitter.com/sytses","https://www.linkedin.com/in/sijbrandij","sytses",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/sid-sijbrandij",{},"en-us/blog/authors/sid-sijbrandij","ZdVvFbtL6NKLtKZEjFCVOecdpvuPzX3wmEZBrC6pRWg",[718,731,746],{"content":719,"config":729},{"title":720,"description":721,"authors":722,"heroImage":724,"date":725,"body":726,"category":11,"tags":727},"Teaching software development the easy way using GitLab","Learn how University of Washington lecturer Stephen G. Dame uses GitLab for Education to manage student assignments, distribute course materials, and provide inline code feedback at scale.\n",[723],"Rod Burns","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749659537/Blog/Hero%20Images/display-article-image-0679-1800x945-fy26.png","2026-04-29","For instructors teaching software development, one of the biggest logistical challenges is assignment distribution and feedback at scale. How do you give large groups of students access to course materials, keep solution code private, and still deliver meaningful, contextual feedback without lots of administrative overhead?\n\nThe **[GitLab for Education program](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/)** provides qualifying institutions with free access to **GitLab Ultimate**, enabling instructors to build professional-grade workflows that mirror real-world software development environments. In this article, you'll learn how Stephen G. Dame, a lecturer in the Computing and Software Systems department at the University of Washington, Bothell, uses simple workflows in GitLab to manage everything from course materials to student feedback across multiple classes.\n\n## From aerospace to academia: Bringing GitLab to the classroom\n\nDame came to academia with years of experience as a chief software engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, where GitLab was used for aerospace projects. As an adjunct professor, he became an early advocate for GitLab within the university, joining the GitLab for Education program to access the full feature set needed to run structured, scalable course workflows.\n\n> **\"GitLab provides the greatest way to organize multiple classes, student assignments, lectures, and code samples through the use of Groups and Subgroups, which I found to be unique to GitLab compared to other repository platforms.\"**\n>\n> - Stephen G. Dame, University of Washington, Bothell\n\n## Set up groups: Build the right structure before writing a line of code\n\nThe foundation of an effective GitLab-based course is a well-planned group hierarchy. GitLab's **[Groups and Subgroups](https://docs.gitlab.com/tutorials/manage_user/#create-the-organization-parent-group-and-subgroups)** allow instructors to model the natural structure of a university department institution, course, and role with precise, inheritable permissions at every level.\n\nDame's structure places the university at the root (`UWTeaching`), with each course occupying its own subgroup (e.g. `css430`). Within each course sit repositories for `lecture-materials` and `code`, alongside dedicated Subgroups for `students` and `graders`. Instructor materials remain private, while student and grader subgroups are configured with controlled permissions so that assignment briefs and solutions are visible only to the right people.\n\n![Screenshot of GitLab group hierarchy — institution, course subgroup, and per-student subgroups](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1777463673/dpxfnitv76pdmvcqtgag.png)\n\nPermissions cascade downward through the hierarchy via **Manage > Members**, allowing Dame to add students to a course's `students` subgroup with `Reporter` access and an expiration date tied to the end of the academic quarter. Students can clone and pull from assignment repositories but cannot push — keeping solution code firmly under instructor control.\n\nStudents are guided to set up SSH keys across all their working environments (local machines, cloud shells, virtual machines) so they can clone repositories and receive weekly updates via `git pull`. They copy relevant code into their own private repositories to manage their own version history.\n\n**Tip for large classes:** For larger cohorts, adding students by hand is impractical. GitLab's REST API lets you automate subgroup creation and membership from a list of usernames. Below is a sample Python script that handles this:\n\n```python\n    import gitlab\n    from datetime import datetime\n\n    # Connect to your GitLab instance\n    gl = gitlab.Gitlab('https://gitlab.com', private_token='YOUR_PRIVATE_TOKEN')\n\n    # Target parent group ID (e.g., the ID for \"css430 > students\")\n    parent_group_id = 12345678\n\n    # Set expiration: typically the beginning of the next month after quarter end\n    expiry_date = '2025-01-01'\n\n    # List of collected student usernames\n    student_list = ['alice_css430', 'bob_css430', 'carol_css430', 'dave_css430', 'eve_css430']\n\n    for username in student_list:\n        try:\n            # 1. Create a personal subgroup for the student\n            subgroup = gl.groups.create({\n                'name': username,\n                'path': username,\n                'parent_id': parent_group_id,\n                'visibility': 'private'\n            })\n\n            # 2. Add student to the new subgroup with Expiration\n            user = gl.users.list(username=username)[0]\n            subgroup.members.create({\n                'user_id': user.id,\n                'access_level': gitlab.const.REPORTER_ACCESS,\n                'expires_at': expiry_date\n            })\n            print(f\"Success: Subgroup created and student added for {username}\")\n        except Exception as e:\n            print(f\"Error processing {username}: {e}\")\n```\nThere is also an [open source project that automates class management](https://gitlab.com/edu-docs/class-management-automation) published by GitLab that provides additional tooling for this workflow.\n## Give feedback where the work actually lives\n\nOnce the structure is in place, the feedback workflow is where GitLab's value becomes most apparent to students. Dame asks students to submit assignments by opening a **[merge request](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/merge_requests/)** in their repository. This gives instructors an immediate, clean diff of everything the student has written.\n![A GitLab merge request showing inline code comment function for an instructor](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1777467468/icclzyglbkwlvfysggbi.png)\nInstructors can click any line of code and leave an **inline comment** — not just flagging what is wrong, but explaining why, and pointing to what to look at next. Students receive this feedback in direct context with their code, which is far more actionable than a comment at the bottom of a submitted document.\n\n## Join GitLab for Education\n\nSetting up your first GitLab assignment takes some initial effort, but once the structure is in place it largely runs itself. The real payoff goes beyond organization: Students graduate having worked daily in an environment that mirrors professional software development, building habits around [version control](https://about.gitlab.com/topics/version-control/) and [code review](https://docs.gitlab.com/development/code_review/) rather than learning them as abstract concepts.\n\nIf you are just getting started, keep it simple. Begin with a single course group, one assignment template, and a basic pipeline. The structure will grow naturally alongside your confidence with the platform.\n\nMake sure to **[sign up for GitLab for Education](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/)** so that you and your students can access all top-tier features, including unlimited reviewers on merge requests, additional compute minutes, and expanded storage.\n\n> [Apply to the GitLab for Education program today](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/).",[621,728],"open source",{"featured":14,"template":15,"slug":730},"teaching-software-development-the-easy-way-using-gitlab",{"content":732,"config":744},{"description":733,"authors":734,"heroImage":736,"date":737,"title":738,"body":739,"category":11,"tags":740},"AI-generated code is 34% of development work. Discover how to balance productivity gains with quality, reliability, and security.",[735],"Manav Khurana","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1767982271/e9ogyosmuummq7j65zqg.png","2026-01-08","AI is reshaping DevSecOps: Attend GitLab Transcend to see what’s next","AI promises a step change in innovation velocity, but most software teams are hitting a wall. According to our latest [Global DevSecOps Report](https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/), AI-generated code now accounts for 34% of all development work. Yet 70% of DevSecOps professionals report that AI is making compliance management more difficult, and 76% say agentic AI will create unprecedented security challenges.\n\nThis is the AI paradox: AI accelerates coding, but software delivery slows down as teams struggle to test, secure, and deploy all that code.\n\n## Productivity gains meet workflow bottlenecks\nThe problem isn't AI itself. It's how software gets built today. The traditional DevSecOps lifecycle contains hundreds of small tasks that developers must navigate manually: updating tickets, running tests, requesting reviews, waiting for approvals, fixing merge conflicts, addressing security findings. These tasks drain an average of seven hours per week from every team member, according to our research.\n\nDevelopment teams are producing code faster than ever, but that code still crawls through fragmented toolchains, manual handoffs, and disconnected processes. In fact, 60% of DevSecOps teams use more than five tools for software development overall, and 49% use more than five AI tools. This fragmentation creates collaboration barriers, with 94% of DevSecOps professionals experiencing factors that limit collaboration in the software development lifecycle.\n\nThe answer isn't more tools. It's intelligent orchestration that brings software teams and their AI agents together across projects and release cycles, with enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance built in.\n\n## Seeking deeper human-AI partnerships\nDevSecOps professionals don't want AI to take over — they want reliable partnerships. The vast majority (82%) say using agentic AI would increase their job satisfaction, and 43% envision an ideal future with a 50/50 split between human and AI contributions. They're ready to trust AI with 37% of their daily tasks without human review, particularly for documentation, test writing, and code reviews.\n\nWhat we heard resoundingly from DevSecOps professionals is that AI won't replace them; rather, it will fundamentally reshape their roles. 83% of DevSecOps professionals believe AI will significantly change their work within five years, and notably, 76% think this will create more engineering jobs, not fewer. As coding becomes easier with AI, engineers who can architect systems, ensure quality, and apply business context will be in high demand.\n\nCritically, 88% agree there are essential human qualities that AI will never fully replace, including creativity, innovation, collaboration, and strategic vision.\n\nSo how can organizations bridge the gap between AI’s promise and the reality of fragmented workflows?\n\n## Join us at GitLab Transcend: Explore how to drive real value with agentic AI\nOn February 10, 2026, GitLab will be hosting Transcend, where we'll reveal how intelligent orchestration transforms AI-powered software development. You'll get a first look at GitLab's upcoming product roadmap and learn how teams are solving real-world challenges by modernizing development workflows with AI.\n\nOrganizations winning in this new era balance AI adoption with security, compliance, and platform consolidation. AI offers genuine productivity gains when implemented thoughtfully — not by replacing human developers, but by freeing DevSecOps professionals to focus on strategic thinking and creative innovation.\n\n[Register for Transcend today](https://about.gitlab.com/events/transcend/virtual/) to secure your spot and discover how intelligent orchestration can help your software teams stay in flow.",[741,742,743],"AI/ML","DevOps platform","security",{"featured":27,"template":15,"slug":745},"ai-is-reshaping-devsecops-attend-gitlab-transcend-to-see-whats-next",{"content":747,"config":758},{"title":748,"description":749,"authors":750,"heroImage":752,"date":753,"body":754,"category":11,"tags":755},"Atlassian ending Data Center as GitLab maintains deployment choice","As Atlassian transitions Data Center customers to cloud-only, GitLab presents a menu of deployment choices that map to business needs.",[751],"Emilio Salvador","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750098354/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945%20%281%29_5XrohmuWBNuqL89BxVUzWm_1750098354056.png","2025-10-07","Change is never easy, especially when it's not your choice. Atlassian's announcement that [all Data Center products will reach end-of-life by March 28, 2029](https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-ascend), means thousands of organizations must now reconsider their DevSecOps deployment and infrastructure. But you don't have to settle for deployment options that don't fit your needs. GitLab maintains your freedom to choose — whether you need self-managed for compliance, cloud for convenience, or hybrid for flexibility — all within a single AI-powered DevSecOps platform that respects your requirements.\n\nWhile other vendors force migrations to cloud-only architectures, GitLab remains committed to supporting the deployment choices that match your business needs. Whether you're managing sensitive government data, operating in air-gapped environments, or simply prefer the control of self-managed deployments, we understand that one size doesn't fit all.\n\n## The cloud isn't the answer for everyone\n\nFor the many companies that invested millions of dollars in Data Center deployments, including those that migrated to Data Center [after its Server products were discontinued](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/atlassian-server-ending-move-to-a-single-devsecops-platform/), this announcement represents more than a product sunset. It signals a fundamental shift away from customer-centric architecture choices, forcing enterprises into difficult positions: accept a deployment model that doesn't fit their needs, or find a vendor that respects their requirements.\n\nMany of the organizations requiring self-managed deployments represent some of the world's most important organizations: healthcare systems protecting patient data, financial institutions managing trillions in assets, government agencies safeguarding national security, and defense contractors operating in air-gapped environments.\n\nThese organizations don't choose self-managed deployments for convenience; they choose them for compliance, security, and sovereignty requirements that cloud-only architectures simply cannot meet. Organizations operating in closed environments with restricted or no internet access aren't exceptions — they represent a significant portion of enterprise customers across various industries.\n\n![GitLab vs. Atlassian comparison table](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1759928476/ynl7wwmkh5xyqhszv46m.jpg)\n\n## The real cost of forced cloud migration goes beyond dollars\n\nWhile cloud-only vendors frame mandatory migrations as \"upgrades,\" organizations face substantial challenges beyond simple financial costs:\n\n* **Lost integration capabilities:** Years of custom integrations with legacy systems, carefully crafted workflows, and enterprise-specific automations become obsolete. Organizations with deep integrations to legacy systems often find cloud migration technically infeasible.\n\n* **Regulatory constraints:** For organizations in regulated industries, cloud migration isn't just complex — it's often not permitted. Data residency requirements, air-gapped environments, and strict regulatory frameworks don't bend to vendor preferences. The absence of single-tenant solutions in many cloud-only approaches creates insurmountable compliance barriers.\n\n* **Productivity impacts:** Cloud-only architectures often require juggling multiple products: separate tools for planning, code management, CI/CD, and documentation. Each tool means another context switch, another integration to maintain, another potential point of failure. GitLab research shows [30% of developers spend at least 50% of their job maintaining and/or integrating their DevSecOps toolchain](https://about.gitlab.com/developer-survey/). Fragmented architectures exacerbate this challenge rather than solving it.\n\n## GitLab offers choice, commitment, and consolidation\n\nEnterprise customers deserve a trustworthy technology partner. That's why we've committed to supporting a range of deployment options — whether you need on-premises for compliance, hybrid for flexibility, or cloud for convenience, the choice remains yours. That commitment continues with [GitLab Duo](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo-agent-platform/), our AI solution that supports developers at every stage of their workflow.\n\nBut we offer more than just deployment flexibility. While other vendors might force you to cobble together their products into a fragmented toolchain, GitLab provides everything in a **comprehensive AI-native DevSecOps platform**. Source code management, CI/CD, security scanning, Agile planning, and documentation are all managed within a single application and a single vendor relationship.\n\nThis isn't theoretical. When Airbus and [Iron Mountain](https://about.gitlab.com/customers/iron-mountain/) evaluated their existing fragmented toolchains, they consistently identified challenges: poor user experience, missing functionalities like built-in security scanning and review apps, and management complexity from plugin troubleshooting. **These aren't minor challenges; they're major blockers for modern software delivery.**\n\n## Your migration path: Simpler than you think\n\nWe've helped thousands of organizations migrate from other vendors, and we've built the tools and expertise to make your transition smooth:\n\n* **Automated migration tools:** Our [Bitbucket Server importer](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/import/bitbucket_server/) brings over repositories, pull requests, comments, and even Large File Storage (LFS) objects. For Jira, our [built-in importer](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/import/jira/) handles issues, descriptions, and labels, with professional services available for complex migrations.\n\n* **Proven at scale:** A 500 GiB repository with 13,000 pull requests, 10,000 branches, and 7,000 tags is likely to [take just 8 hours to migrate](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/import/bitbucket_server/) from Bitbucket to GitLab using parallel processing.\n\n* **Immediate ROI:** A [Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by GitLab](https://about.gitlab.com/resources/study-forrester-tei-gitlab-ultimate/) found that investing in GitLab Ultimate confirms these benefits translate to real bottom-line impact, with a three-year 483% ROI, 5x time saved in security related activities, and 25% savings in software toolchain costs.\n\n## Start your journey to a unified DevSecOps platform\n\nForward-thinking organizations aren't waiting for vendor-mandated deadlines. They're evaluating alternatives now, while they have time to migrate thoughtfully to platforms that protect their investments and deliver on promises.\n\nOrganizations invest in self-managed deployments because they need control, compliance, and customization. When vendors deprecate these capabilities, they remove not just features but the fundamental ability to choose environments matching business requirements.\n\nModern DevSecOps platforms should offer complete functionality that respects deployment needs, consolidates toolchains, and accelerates software delivery, without forcing compromises on security or data sovereignty.\n\n[Talk to our sales team](https://about.gitlab.com/sales/) today about your migration options, or explore our [comprehensive migration resources](https://about.gitlab.com/move-to-gitlab-from-atlassian/) to see how thousands of organizations have already made the switch.\n\nYou also can [try GitLab Ultimate with GitLab Duo Enterprise](https://about.gitlab.com/free-trial/devsecops/) for free for 30 days to see what a unified DevSecOps platform can do for your organization.",[572,565,756,757],"product","features",{"featured":27,"template":15,"slug":759},"atlassian-ending-data-center-as-gitlab-maintains-deployment-choice",{"promotions":761},[762,776,787,798],{"id":763,"categories":764,"header":766,"text":767,"button":768,"image":773},"ai-modernization",[765],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":769,"config":770},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":771,"dataGaName":772,"dataGaLocation":243},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":774},{"src":775},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":777,"categories":778,"header":779,"text":767,"button":780,"image":784},"devops-modernization",[756,11],"Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":781,"config":782},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":783,"dataGaName":772,"dataGaLocation":243},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":785},{"src":786},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":788,"categories":789,"header":790,"text":767,"button":791,"image":795},"security-modernization",[743],"Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":792,"config":793},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":794,"dataGaName":772,"dataGaLocation":243},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":796},{"src":797},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"id":799,"paths":800,"header":803,"text":804,"button":805,"image":810},"github-azure-migration",[801,802],"migration-from-azure-devops-to-gitlab","integrating-azure-devops-scm-and-gitlab","Is your team ready for GitHub's Azure move?","GitHub is already rebuilding around Azure. Find out what it means for you.",{"text":806,"config":807},"See how GitLab compares to GitHub",{"href":808,"dataGaName":809,"dataGaLocation":243},"/compare/gitlab-vs-github/github-azure-migration/","github azure migration",{"config":811},{"src":786},{"header":813,"blurb":814,"button":815,"secondaryButton":820},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":816,"config":817},"Get your free trial",{"href":818,"dataGaName":50,"dataGaLocation":819},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":506,"config":821},{"href":54,"dataGaName":55,"dataGaLocation":819},1777493573278]