[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":790},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud":3,"navigation-en-us":33,"banner-en-us":433,"footer-en-us":443,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Sean Packham":685,"blog-related-posts-en-us-why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud":699,"assessment-promotions-en-us":741,"next-steps-en-us":780},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":22,"isFeatured":12,"meta":23,"navigation":24,"path":25,"publishedDate":20,"seo":26,"stem":30,"tagSlugs":31,"__hash__":32},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud.yml","Why We Are Not Leaving The Cloud",[7],"sean-packham",null,"engineering",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9},"Why we are not leaving the cloud","What we learned from our community vetting our proposal to leave the cloud.",[18],"Sean Packham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663397/Blog/Hero%20Images/logoforblogpost.jpg","2017-03-02","\n\n\u003Cscript>\n  var disqus_identifier = '/blog/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/';\n\u003C/script>\n\nTowards the end of 2016 we said we were [leaving the cloud for bare metal](/blog/why-choose-bare-metal/) and shared our [hardware proposal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153031). In December 2016, after receiving hundreds of comments and emails filled with advice and warnings, [Sid and the team decided](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/727#note_20044060) to keep GitLab.com in the cloud. The rest of the post summarizes some of the great community support and feedback we received and ends with how we are committed to making GitLab.com fast and stable in the cloud. Our decision was based on  more than what is below but we wanted to give you a good summary of all the interesting things that were shared publicly.\n\n\u003C!-- more -->\n\n## Let's begin on the topic of cost\n\n> When I was at Koding we made a similar move from AWS to bare metal. The costs were amazing. Something like $20k a month for what in AWS would cost $200k. I have been saying for a very long time that once you hit a certain scale AWS no longer makes sense. *[Geraint - GitLab blog: Going bare metal](/blog/why-choose-bare-metal/#comment-2999631471)*\n\n> We had 140 servers hosted in New York City for 10 years or so, and hosting only was going up and up, and contracts didn't give us flexibility to add cabinets when we needed. We basically had to cancel the previous contract, make a new one, pay for the upgrade, pay for the cabinet setup, etc... At some point, when we had financial trouble paying $14K/month for hosting, we decided to move all our servers from NYC to Tallinn, Estonia, where we built our own a small scale datacenter. As a result, we were able to cut hosting fees x10. *[Dmitri - GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](/blog/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/#comment-3049071074)*\n\n\u003Cdiv style=\"font-size: 38px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 45px 0 55px; font-style: italic;\">\nIt's not just the cost of owning and renewing the hardware, it's everything else that comes with it – daenney\n\u003C/div>\n\n> It's not just the cost of owning and renewing the hardware, it's everything else that comes with it. Designing your network, performance tuning and debugging everything. Suddenly you have a capacity issue, now what b/c you're not likely to have a spare 100 servers racked and ready to go, or be able to spin them up in 2m? Autoscaling? *[daenney - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153296)*\n\n> Application Architecture is far more important than Cloud vs. Bare Metal. It is just easier and more cost effective to throw more bare metal hardware at the problem than it is cloud instances. For some this does make bare metal the better option. *[mohctp - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13162964)*\n\n> Moving to your own hardware will almost certainly improve performance, reduce incidental downtime, and cut costs substantially. Including hiring more engineers, you might expect total costs to be ~40-50% of what you would have spent on cloud-based services over the first 24 months. If your hardware lifecycle is 36-48 months, you will see large savings beyond 24 months. *[bobf - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153413)*\n\n> I think they are going to underestimate the cost to GitLab in the long run. When they need to pay for someone to be a 30 minute drive from their DC 24/7/365 after the first outage, when they realize how much spare hardware they are going to want around, etc. *[manacit - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154057)*\n\n## What About Performance?\n\n> A cloud service providers' biggest responsibilities to its customers are security, durability, availability and performance -- in that order. You guys are vastly underestimating the complexity involved in getting first 3 right. *[mritun - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155809)*\n\n> Very few teams at Google run on dedicated machines. Those that do are enormous, both in the scale of their infrastructure and in their team sizes. I'm not saying always go with a cloud provider, I'm reiterating that you'd better be certain you need to. *[boulos - Hacker News: Going bare metal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12941210)*\n\n\u003Cdiv style=\"font-size: 38px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 45px 0 55px; font-style: italic;\">\nA company rolling their own system doesn't have to share, and they can optimise specifically for their own requirements – taneq\n\u003C/div>\n\n> As a cloud provider, though, you're trying to provide shared resources to a group of clients. A company rolling their own system doesn't have to share, and they can optimise specifically for their own requirements. *[taneq - Hacker News: Going bare metal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940925)*\n\n> My thinking is that elasticity and recovery from hardware failure, and migration and multi-data center high availability will become concerns. Moving from the cloud to bare metal gives you performance and simplicity, but doesn't give you as many ways of recovering from network interruptions, and hardware failures. *[wpostma - the GitLab blog: Going bare metal](/blog/why-choose-bare-metal/#comment-3001348957)*\n\n> It sounds like they didn't design for the cloud and are now experiencing the consequences. The cloud has different tradeoffs and performance characteristics from a datacenter. If you plan for that, it's great. Your software will be robust as a result. If you assume the characteristics of a data center, you're likely to run into problems. *[wandernotlost - Hacker News: Going bare metal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940082)*\n\n\u003Cdiv style=\"font-size: 38px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 45px 0 55px; font-style: italic;\">\nIt makes sense to keep GitLab.com as an eat-your-own-dog-food-at-scale environment – jtwaleson\n\u003C/div>\n\n> It makes sense to keep GitLab.com as an eat-your-own-dog-food-at-scale environment.  If one of their customers that run on-premise has performance issues they can't just say: GitLab.com uses a totally different architecture so you're on your own. They need GitLab.com to be as close as possible to the standard product. *[twaleson on Hacker News: Going bare metal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940462)*\n\n> They are moving from cloud to bare metal because of performance while using a bunch of software that are notoriously slow and wasteful. I would optimise the hell out of my stack before commit to a change like this. Building your own racks does not deliver business value and it is extremely error prone process (been there, done that). *[StreamBright - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153866)*\n\n## Advice on our storage proposals\n\n> __Don't f*ck with storage.__ 32 file servers for 96TB? Same question as with networking re:ceph. What are your failure domains? How much does it cost to maintain the FTEs who can run this thing? *[Spooky23 - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153860)* - *Spooky23 did warn us \"I'm a cranky old person now\".*\n\n> I think there might be a pretty big IOPS drop when you switch over to this hardware. You're looking at having approximately 60 7200 RPM drives in this CephFS cluster. Doing the math, if you assume each of those drives can do 100 read and 100 write IOPS, and that you are doing 3x replication on write (plus journal writes), you're not going to get anywhere near the numbers that you want. *[Nicholas - the GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](/blog/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/#comment-3047537669)*\n\n>I would think that GitLab's workload is mostly random, which would pose a problem for larger drives. The SSDs are a great idea, but I've only seen 8TB drives used when there are 2 to 3 tiers; with 8TB drives being all the way on the bottom. I'm not sure how effective having a single SSD as a cache drive for 24TBs of 8TB disks will be. *[lykron - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153333)*\n\n## and our choice of 8TB drives\n\n> If you are looking for performance, do not get the 8TB drives. In my experience, drives above 5TB do not have good response times. I don't have hard numbers, but I built a 10 disk RAID6 array with 5TB disks and 2TB disks and the 2TB disks were a lot more responsive. *[lykron - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153196)*\n\n> Just a few quick notes. I've experience running ~300TB of usable Ceph storage. Stay away from the 8TB drives. Why are you using fat twins? Honestly, what does that buy you? You need more spindles, and fewer cores and memory. With your current configuration, what are you getting per rack unit? *[halbritt - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153786)*\n\n##  Feedback on our network proposals\n\n>__Don't f*ck with networking.__ Do you have experience operating same or similar workloads on your super micro SDN? Will the CEO of your super micro VAR pickup his phone at 2AM when you call? *[Spooky23 - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153860)*\n\n> I would not use 10GBase-T since it's designed for desktop use. I suggest ideally 25G SFP28 (AOC-MH25G-m2S2TM) but 10G SFP+ (AOC-MTG-i4S) is OK. The speed and type of the switch needs to match the NIC (you linked to an SFP+ switch that isn't compatible with your proposed 10GBase-T NICs). *[wmf - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153678)*\n\n> I didn't see it mentioned but what are your plans for the network strategy. Are you planning to run dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 ? IPv4 only? Internal IPv6 only with NAT64 to the public stuff? Hopefully IPv6 shows up somewhere in the stack. It's sad to see big players not using it yet. *[tomschlick - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153922)*\n\n> Don't fall into the trap of extending VLANs everywhere. You should definitely be routing (not switching) between different routers.\n>\n> \"Should we have a separate network for Ceph traffic?\" Yes, if you want your Ceph cluster to remain usable during rebuilds. Ceph will peg the internal network during any sort of rebuild event. *[devicenull - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153339)*\n\n## What did the community have to say about Ceph?\n\n> I lead a technical operations team that moved our infrastructure from public cloud (~400 instances) to private cloud (~55 physical servers) and finally, to Kubernetes (6 physical servers). We actually run a mix of Kubernetes and OpenStack, putting apps and services in Kubernetes and all data storage in OpenStack. I've done extensive testing with Ceph and while it adds flexibility, you're not going to be able to touch the I/O performance of bare metal local disks for database use. For storage, I like to keep it simple. I rely on the Linux OS running on standard tried-and-true filesystems (ext4 and ZFS) and build redundancy at the software layer. *[Chris - GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](/blog/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/#comment-3047381500)*\n\n> We had disastrous experiences with Ceph and Gluster on bare metal. I think this says more about the immaturity (and difficulty) of distributed file systems than the cloud per se. *__[codinghorror - Hacker News: Going bare metal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940042)__*\n\n> You need to make sure that there is not an architecture that you can build that absolves you of having to run a CephFS cluster. CephFS is cool, but it is a single point of failure right now, and comes with a ton of caveats. Performance and stability will be much improved if you remove the layer of abstraction it creates and write your app to handle some sort of distributed storage system. *[Nicholas - GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](/blog/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/#comment-3047478761)*\n\n\u003Cdiv style=\"font-size: 38px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 45px 0 55px; font-style: italic;\">\nBe very very careful about Ceph hype – late2part\n\u003C/div>\n\n> Be very very careful about Ceph hype. Ceph is good at redundancy and throughput, but not at IOPS, and Rados IOPS are poor. We couldn't get over 60k random RW IOPS across a 120 OSD cluster with 120 SSDs. *[late2part - GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154620)*\n\n> If you're using CephFS and everyone else wants to be using other Cloud storage solutions, that would actually put you at a disconnect with your users and leave room for a competitor with the tools and experience to scale out on Cloud storage to come in offering support. *[Rapzid - Hacker News: Going bare metal](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12946174)*\n\n## How would moving to metal affect the GitLab team?\n\n> Your core competency is code, not infrastructure, so striking out to build all of these new capabilities in your team and organization will come at a cost that you can not predict. Looking at total cost of ownership of cloud vs steel isn't as simple as comparing the hosting costs, hardware and facilities. *[ninjakeyboard - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153779)*\n\n\u003Cdiv style=\"font-size: 38px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 45px 0 55px; font-style: italic;\">\nYour core competency is code, not infrastructure – ninjakeyboard\n\u003C/div>\n\n> Another problem I would say to move to metal is that you lose support. Cloud vendors have entire teams, network, systems, datacenters etc. at your disposal, this is included in the price you are paying. Are you sure you are ready to debug networking issues, systems problems at the level as the cloud vendors? It is a tough job. *[l1x - GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](/blog/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/#comment-3047353138)*\n\n> I think you're under estimating the number of people required to run your own infrastructure. You need people who can configure networking gear, people swapping out failed NICs/Drives at the datacenter, someone managing vendor relationships, and people doing capacity planning. *[thebyrd-on Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153644)*\n\n## Let’s just abandon x86 altogether\n\n\u003Cdiv style=\"font-size: 38px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 45px 0 55px; font-style: italic;\">\nWhy bind yourself to Intel servers? – MBH\n\u003C/div>\n\n> Why bind yourself to Intel servers? The max CPU-to-Memory bandwidth is 68 GB/s. That's horrible for crunching data fast. IBM's POWER8 systems have servers with 230 GB/s CPU-to-Memory bandwidth, and others with 320 GB/s...\n>\n> ...POWER8 CPUs have a different architecture than Intel: PPC64, so you may need to recompile some things, or have some Intel systems for workloads that can only run on x86_64. *[MBH - GitLab blog: Proposed server purchase](/blog/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/#comment-3053432409)*\n\n## We all have an opinion\n\n> I've only ever built desktop machines, and this top comment drew a surprising parallel to most help me with my desktop build type posts. Granted, I'm sure as you dig deeper, the reasoning may be much different, but myself being ignorant about a proper server build, it was somehow reassuring to see power and cooling at the top! *[davidbrent - Hacker News: Proposed server purchase](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154202)*\n\n## We are taking a step back and using a boring solution\n\nWe want to scale intelligently and build great software; we don’t want to be an infrastructure company. We are embracing and are excited about solving the challenge of scaling GitLab.com on the cloud, because solving it for us also solved it for the largest enterprises in the world using GitLab on premise.\n\nMost of the scaling headaches have occurred because Git is read-heavy: looking at our Git Read/Write performance chart below, you can see that for about every 300 reads we get 10 writes. We tried to solve this by running CephFS in the cloud but it goes against our value of using the simplest, most  [boring solution](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/#values) for a problem.\n\n![An average of 300 Reads to 10 writes](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud-chart.png)\n\n## How are we going to get back to basics?\n\n1. We spread all our storage into [multiple NFS shards](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/711) and [dropped CephFS](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/817) from our stack.\n2. We created [Gitaly](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly) so that we can stop relying on NFS for horizontal scaling and speed up Git access through caching.\n\n[Gitaly](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly) will serve as the single interface for all our Git access throughout our stack. With Gitaly the gitrpc travels over the network and the disk is accessed locally. Instead of all the disk access going over the network. It will also be used to improve our monitoring of Git resource usage to make better decisions; currently we are only sampling processes.\n\nWe would love if the community would challenge our use of Gitaly with the same passion they challenged us before. What do you think of the software architecture? Can a caching layer like this scale? What alarm bells are set off? We can’t wait to hear your feedback!\n\nWe would like to thank our community, customers, team and board for all their great support – you all make GitLab an incredible product.\n","yml",{},true,"/en-us/blog/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud",{"title":15,"description":16,"ogTitle":15,"ogDescription":16,"noIndex":12,"ogImage":19,"ogUrl":27,"ogSiteName":28,"ogType":29,"canonicalUrls":27},"https://about.gitlab.com/blog/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud","https://about.gitlab.com","article","en-us/blog/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud",[],"h0TKTcUVF4sTVXsLMyP8cu-sL0B90AjCEH7b0f00zPY",{"data":34},{"logo":35,"freeTrial":40,"sales":45,"login":50,"items":55,"search":363,"minimal":394,"duo":413,"pricingDeployment":423},{"config":36},{"href":37,"dataGaName":38,"dataGaLocation":39},"/","gitlab logo","header",{"text":41,"config":42},"Get free 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statement",{"items":675},[676,679,682],{"text":677,"config":678},"Terms",{"href":503,"dataGaName":504,"dataGaLocation":451},{"text":680,"config":681},"Cookies",{"dataGaName":513,"dataGaLocation":451,"id":514,"isOneTrustButton":24},{"text":683,"config":684},"Privacy",{"href":508,"dataGaName":509,"dataGaLocation":451},[686],{"id":687,"title":18,"body":8,"config":688,"content":690,"description":8,"extension":22,"meta":694,"navigation":24,"path":695,"seo":696,"stem":697,"__hash__":698},"blogAuthors/en-us/blog/authors/sean-packham.yml",{"template":689},"BlogAuthor",{"name":18,"config":691},{"headshot":692,"ctfId":693},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749659488/Blog/Author%20Headshots/gitlab-logo-extra-whitespace.png","Sean-Packham",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/sean-packham",{},"en-us/blog/authors/sean-packham","h9V5QkLUhYxBqez5k50ncdjLm1LcDqj5ai5DuI6-vbw",[700,713,725],{"content":701,"config":711},{"title":702,"description":703,"authors":704,"heroImage":706,"date":707,"category":9,"tags":708,"body":710},"How IIT Bombay students are coding the future with GitLab","At GitLab, we often talk about how software accelerates innovation. But sometimes, you have to step away from the Zoom calls and stand in a crowded university hall to remember why we do this.",[705],"Nick Veenhof","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099013/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945%20%2814%29_6VTUA8mUhOZNDaRVNPeKwl_1750099012960.png","2026-01-08",[255,607,709],"open source","The GitLab team recently had the privilege of judging the **iHack Hackathon** at **IIT Bombay's E-Summit**. The energy was electric, the coffee was flowing, and the talent was undeniable. But what struck us most wasn't just the code — it was the sheer determination of students to solve real-world problems, often overcoming significant logistical and financial hurdles to simply be in the room.\n\n\nThrough our [GitLab for Education program](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/), we aim to empower the next generation of developers with tools and opportunity. Here is a look at what the students built, and how they used GitLab to bridge the gap between idea and reality.\n\n## The challenge: Build faster, build securely\n\nThe premise for the GitLab track of the hackathon was simple: Don't just show us a product; show us how you built it. We wanted to see how students utilized GitLab's platform — from Issue Boards to CI/CD pipelines — to accelerate the development lifecycle.\n\nThe results were inspiring.\n\n## The winners\n\n### 1st place: Team Decode — Democratizing Scientific Research\n\n**Project:** FIRE (Fast Integrated Research Environment)\n\nTeam Decode took home the top prize with a solution that warms a developer's heart: a local-first, blazing-fast data processing tool built with [Rust](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/secure-rust-development-with-gitlab/) and Tauri. They identified a massive pain point for data science students: existing tools are fragmented, slow, and expensive.\n\nTheir solution, FIRE, allows researchers to visualize complex formats (like NetCDF) instantly. What impressed the judges most was their \"hacker\" ethos. They didn't just build a tool; they built it to be open and accessible.\n\n**How they used GitLab:** Since the team lived far apart, asynchronous communication was key. They utilized **GitLab Issue Boards** and **Milestones** to track progress and integrated their repo with Telegram to get real-time push notifications. As one team member noted, \"Coordinating all these technologies was really difficult, and what helped us was GitLab... the Issue Board really helped us track who was doing what.\"\n\n![Team Decode](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1767380253/epqazj1jc5c7zkgqun9h.jpg)\n\n### 2nd place: Team BichdeHueDost — Reuniting to Solve Payments\n\n**Project:** SemiPay (RFID Cashless Payment for Schools)\n\nThe team name, BichdeHueDost, translates to \"Friends who have been set apart.\" It's a fitting name for a group of friends who went to different colleges but reunited to build this project. They tackled a unique problem: handling cash in schools for young children. Their solution used RFID cards backed by a blockchain ledger to ensure secure, cashless transactions for students.\n\n**How they used GitLab:** They utilized [GitLab CI/CD](https://about.gitlab.com/topics/ci-cd/) to automate the build process for their Flutter application (APK), ensuring that every commit resulted in a testable artifact. This allowed them to iterate quickly despite the \"flaky\" nature of cross-platform mobile development.\n\n![Team BichdeHueDost](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1767380253/pkukrjgx2miukb6nrj5g.jpg)\n\n### 3rd place: Team ZenYukti — Agentic Repository Intelligence\n\n**Project:** RepoInsight AI (AI-powered, GitLab-native intelligence platform)\n\nTeam ZenYukti impressed us with a solution that tackles a universal developer pain point: understanding unfamiliar codebases. What stood out to the judges was the tool's practical approach to onboarding and code comprehension: RepoInsight-AI automatically generates documentation, visualizes repository structure, and even helps identify bugs, all while maintaining context about the entire codebase.\n\n**How they used GitLab:** The team built a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline that showcased GitLab's security and DevOps capabilities. They integrated [GitLab's Security Templates](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/master/lib/gitlab/ci/templates/Security) (SAST, Dependency Scanning, and Secret Detection), and utilized [GitLab Container Registry](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/packages/container_registry/) to manage their Docker images for backend and frontend components. They created an AI auto-review bot that runs on merge requests, demonstrating an \"agentic workflow\" where AI assists in the development process itself.\n\n![Team ZenYukti](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1767380253/ymlzqoruv5al1secatba.jpg)\n\n## Beyond the code: A lesson in inclusion\n\nWhile the code was impressive, the most powerful moment of the event happened away from the keyboard.\n\nDuring the feedback session, we learned about the journey Team ZenYukti took to get to Mumbai. They traveled over 24 hours, covering nearly 1,800 kilometers. Because flights were too expensive and trains were booked, they traveled in the \"General Coach,\" a non-reserved, severely overcrowded carriage.\n\nAs one student described it:\n\n*\"You cannot even imagine something like this... there are no seats... people sit on the top of the train. This is what we have endured.\"*\n\nThis hit home. [Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/inclusion/) are core values at GitLab. We realized that for these students, the barrier to entry wasn't intellect or skill, it was access.\n\nIn that moment, we decided to break that barrier. We committed to reimbursing the travel expenses for the participants who struggled to get there. It's a small step, but it underlines a massive truth: **talent is distributed equally, but opportunity is not.**\n\n![hackathon class together](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1767380252/o5aqmboquz8ehusxvgom.jpg)\n\n### The future is bright (and automated)\n\nWe also saw incredible potential in teams like Prometheus, who attempted to build an autonomous patch remediation tool (DevGuardian), and Team Arrakis, who built a voice-first job portal for blue-collar workers using [GitLab Duo](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo/) to troubleshoot their pipelines.\n\nTo all the students who participated: You are the future. Through [GitLab for Education](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/), we are committed to providing you with the top-tier tools (like GitLab Ultimate) you need to learn, collaborate, and change the world — whether you are coding from a dorm room, a lab, or a train carriage. **Keep shipping.**\n\n> :bulb: Learn more about the [GitLab for Education program](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/).\n",{"slug":712,"featured":12,"template":13},"how-iit-bombay-students-code-future-with-gitlab",{"content":714,"config":723},{"title":715,"description":716,"authors":717,"heroImage":718,"date":719,"category":9,"tags":720,"body":722},"Artois University elevates research and curriculum with GitLab Ultimate for Education","Artois University's CRIL leveraged the GitLab for Education program to gain free access to Ultimate, transforming advanced research and computer science curricula.",[705],"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1750099203/Blog/Hero%20Images/Blog/Hero%20Images/blog-image-template-1800x945%20%2820%29_2bJGC5ZP3WheoqzlLT05C5_1750099203484.png","2025-12-10",[607,255,721],"product","Leading academic institutions face a critical challenge: how to provide thousands of students and researchers with industry-standard, **full-featured DevSecOps tools** without compromising institutional control. Many start with basic version control, but the modern curriculum demands integrated capabilities for planning, security, and advanced CI/CD.\n\nThe **GitLab for Education program** is designed to solve this by providing access to **GitLab Ultimate** for qualifying institutions, allowing them to scale their operations and elevate their academic offerings. \n\nThis article showcases a powerful success story from the **Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens (CRIL)**, a joint laboratory of **Artois University** and CNRS in France. After years of relying solely on GitLab Community Edition (CE), the university's move to GitLab Ultimate through the GitLab for Education program immediately unlocked advanced capabilities, transforming their teaching, research, and contribution workflows virtually overnight. This story demonstrates why GitLab Ultimate is essential for institutions seeking to deliver advanced computer science and research curricula.\n\n## GitLab Ultimate unlocked: Managing scale and driving academic value\n\n**Artois University's** self-managed GitLab instance is a large-scale operation, supporting nearly **3,000 users** across approximately **19,000 projects**, primarily serving computer science students and researchers. While GitLab Community Edition was robust, the upgrade to GitLab Ultimate provided the sophisticated tooling necessary for managing this scale and facilitating advanced university-level work.\n\n***\"We can see the difference,\" says Daniel Le Berre, head of research at CRIL and the instance maintainer. \"It's a completely different product. Each week reveals new features that directly enhance our productivity and teaching.\"***\n\nThe institution joined the GitLab for Education program specifically because it covers both **instructional and non-commercial research use cases** and offers full access to Ultimate's features, removing significant cost barriers.\n\n### Key GitLab Ultimate benefits for students and researchers\n\n* **Advanced project management at scale:** Master's students now benefit from **GitLab Ultimate's project planning features**. This enables them to structure, track, and manage complex, long-term research projects using professional methodologies like portfolio management and advanced issue tracking that seamlessly roll up across their thousands of projects.\n\n* **Enhanced visibility:** Features like improved dashboards and code previews directly in Markdown files dramatically streamline tracking and documentation review, reducing administrative friction for both instructors and students managing large project loads.\n\n## Comprehensive curriculum: From concepts to continuous delivery\n\nGitLab Ultimate is deeply integrated into the computer science curriculum, moving students beyond simple `git` commands to practical **DevSecOps implementation**.\n\n* **Git fundamentals:** Students begin by visualizing concepts using open-source tools to master Git concepts.\n\n* **Full CI/CD implementation:** Students use GitLab CI for rigorous **Test-Driven Development (TDD)** in their software projects. They learn to build, test, and perform quality assurance using unit and integration testing pipelines—core competency made seamless by the integrated platform.\n\n* **DevSecOps for research and documentation:** The university teaches students that DevSecOps principles are vital for all collaborative work. Inspired by earlier work in Delft, students manage and produce critical research documentation (PDFs from Markdown files) using GitLab, incorporating quality checks like linters and spell checks directly in the CI pipeline. This ensures high-quality, reproducible research output.\n\n* **Future-proofing security skills:** The GitLab Ultimate platform immediately positions the institution to incorporate advanced DevSecOps features like SAST and DAST scanning as their research and development code projects grow, ensuring students are prepared for industry security standards.\n\n## Accelerating open source contributions with GitLab Duo\n\nAccess to the full GitLab platform, including our AI capabilities, has empowered students to make impactful contributions to the wider open source community faster than ever before.\n\nTwo Master's students recently completed direct contributions to the GitLab product, adding the **ORCID identifier** into user profiles. Working on GitLab.com, they leveraged **GitLab Duo's AI chat and code suggestions** to navigate the codebase efficiently.\n\n***\"This would not have been possible without GitLab Duo,\" Daniel Le Berre notes. \"The AI features helped students, who might have lacked deep codebase knowledge, deliver meaningful contributions in just two weeks.\"***\n\nThis demonstrates how providing students with cutting-edge tools **accelerates their learning and impact**, allowing them to translate classroom knowledge into real-world contributions immediately.\n\n## Empowering open research and institutional control\n\nThe stability of the self-managed instance at Artois University is key to its success. This model guarantees **institutional control and stability** — a critical factor for long-term research preservation.\n\nThe institution's expertise in this area was recently highlighted in a major 2024 study led by CRIL, titled: \"[Higher Education and Research Forges in France - Definition, uses, limitations encountered and needs analysis](https://hal.science/hal-04208924v4)\" ([Project on GitLab](https://gitlab.in2p3.fr/coso-college-codes-sources-et-logiciels/forges-esr-en)). The research found that the vast majority of public forges in French Higher Education and Research relied on **GitLab**. This finding underscores the consensus among academic leaders that self-hosted solutions are essential for **data control and longevity**, especially when compared to relying on external, commercial forges.\n\n## Unlock GitLab Ultimate for your institution today\n\nThe success story of **Artois University's CRIL** proves the transformative power of the GitLab for Education program. By providing **free access to GitLab Ultimate**, we enable large-scale institutions to:\n\n1.  **Deliver a modern, integrated DevSecOps curriculum.**\n\n2.  **Support advanced, collaborative research projects with Ultimate planning features.**\n\n3.  **Empower students to make AI-assisted open source contributions.**\n\n4.  **Maintain institutional control and data longevity.**\n\nIf your academic institution is ready to equip its students and researchers with the complete DevSecOps platform and its most advanced features, we invite you to join the program.\n\nThe program provides **free access to GitLab Ultimate** for qualifying instructional and non-commercial research use cases.\n\n**Apply now [online](https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/).**\n",{"slug":724,"featured":24,"template":13},"artois-university-elevates-curriculum-with-gitlab-ultimate-for-education",{"content":726,"config":739},{"category":9,"tags":727,"body":730,"date":731,"updatedDate":732,"heroImage":733,"authors":734,"title":737,"description":738},[728,729,102],"tutorial","git","\nEnterprise teams are increasingly migrating from Azure DevOps to GitLab to gain strategic advantages and accelerate secure software delivery. \n\n\n- GitLab comes with integrated controls, policies, and [compliance frameworks](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/compliance/compliance_frameworks/) that allow organizations to implement software delivery standards at scale. This is especially important for regulated industries.\n\n- [Security testing](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/application_security/) is embedded in the pipeline and results show in the developer workflow, including static application security testing (SAST), source code analysis (SCA), dynamic application security testing (DAST), infrastructure-as-code scanning (IaC), container scanning, and API scanning.\n\n- [AI capabilities](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo-agent-platform/) across the full software delivery lifecycle include advanced agent orchestration and customizable flows to support how your organizational teams work.\n\n\nGitLab's open-source, open-core approach, flexible deployment options such as single-tenant dedicated and self-managed, and truly unified platform eliminate integration complexity and security gaps. \n\n\nFor teams facing mounting pressure to accelerate delivery while strengthening security posture and maintaining regulatory compliance, GitLab represents not just a migration but a platform evolution.\n\n\nMigrating from Azure DevOps to GitLab can seem like a daunting task, but with the right approach and tools, it can be a smooth and efficient process. This guide will walk you through the steps needed to successfully migrate your projects, repositories, and pipelines from Azure DevOps to GitLab.\n\n\n## Overview\n\nGitLab provides both [Congregate](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/professional-services-automation/tools/migration/congregate/) (maintained by [GitLab Professional Services](https://about.gitlab.com/professional-services/) organization) and [a built-in Git repository import](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/import/repo_by_url/) for migrating projects from Azure DevOps (ADO). These options support repository-by-repository or bulk migration and preserve git commit history, branches, and tags. With Congregate and professional services tools, we support additional assets such as wikis, work items, CI/CD variables, container images, packages, pipelines, and more (see this [feature matrix](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/professional-services-automation/tools/migration/congregate/-/blob/master/customer/ado-migration-features-matrix.md)). Use this guide to plan and execute your migration and complete post-migration follow-up tasks.\n\n\nEnterprises migrating from ADO to GitLab commonly follow a multi-phase approach:\n\n\n- Migrate repositories from ADO to GitLab using Congregate or GitLab's built-in repository migration.\n\n- Migrate pipelines from Azure Pipelines to GitLab CI/CD.\n\n- Migrate remaining assets such as boards, work items, and artifacts to GitLab Issues, Epics, and the Package and Container Registries.\n\n\nHigh-level migration phases:\n\n\n```mermaid\ngraph LR\n    subgraph Prerequisites\n        direction TB\n        A[\"Set up identity provider (IdP) and\u003Cbr/>provision users\"]\n        A --> B[\"Set up runners and\u003Cbr/>third-party integrations\"]\n        B --> I[\"Users enablement and\u003Cbr/>change management\"]\n    end\n    \n    subgraph MigrationPhase[\"Migration phase\"]\n        direction TB\n        C[\"Migrate source code\"]\n        C --> D[\"Preserve contributions and\u003Cbr/> format history\"]\n        D --> E[\"Migrate work items and\u003Cbr/>map to \u003Ca href=\"https://docs.gitlab.com/topics/plan_and_track/\">GitLab Plan \u003Cbr/>and track work\"]\n    end\n    \n    subgraph PostMigration[\"Post-migration steps\"]\n        direction TB\n        F[\"Create or translate \u003Cbr/>ADO pipelines to GitLab CI\"]\n        F --> G[\"Migrate other assets\u003Cbr/>packages and container images\"]\n        G --> H[\"Introduce \u003Ca href=\"https://docs.gitlab.com/user/application_security/secure_your_application/\">security\u003C/a> and\u003Cbr/>SDLC improvements\"]\n    end\n    \n    Prerequisites --> MigrationPhase\n    MigrationPhase --> PostMigration\n\n    style A fill:#FC6D26\n    style B fill:#FC6D26\n    style I fill:#FC6D26\n    style C fill:#8C929D\n    style D fill:#8C929D\n    style E fill:#8C929D\n    style F fill:#FFA500\n    style G fill:#FFA500\n    style H fill:#FFA500\n```\n\n\n## Planning your migration\n\n\n**To plan your migration, ask these questions:**\n\n\n- How soon do we need to complete the migration?\n\n- Do we understand what will be migrated?\n\n- Who will run the migration?\n\n- What organizational structure do we want in GitLab?\n\n- Are there any constraints, limitations, or pitfalls that need to be taken into account?\n\n\nDetermine your timeline, as it will largely dictate your migration approach. Identify champions or groups familiar with both ADO and GitLab platforms (such as early adopters) to help drive adoption and provide guidance.\n\n\n**Inventory what you need to migrate:**\n\n\n- The number of repositories, pull requests, and contributors\n\n- The number and complexity of work items and pipelines\n\n- Repository sizes and dependency relationships\n\n- Critical integrations and runner requirements (agent pools with specific capabilities)\n\n\nUse GitLab Professional Services's [Evaluate](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/professional-services-automation/tools/utilities/evaluate#beta-azure-devops) tool to produce a complete inventory of your entire Azure DevOps organization, including repositories, PR counts, contributor lists, number of pipelines, work items, CI/CD variables and more. If you're working with the GitLab Professional Services team, share this report with your engagement manager or technical architect to help plan the migration.\n\n\nMigration timing is primarily driven by pull request count, repository size, and amount of contributions (e.g. comments in PR, work items, etc). For example, 1,000 small repositories with few PRs and limited contributors can migrate much faster than a smaller set of repositories containing tens of thousands of PRs and thousands of contributors. Use your inventory data to estimate effort and plan test runs before proceeding with production migrations.\n\n\nCompare inventory against your desired timeline and decide whether to migrate all repositories at once or in batches. If teams cannot migrate simultaneously, batch and stagger migrations to align with team schedules. For example, in Professional Services engagements, we organize migrations into waves of 200-300 projects to manage complexity and respect API rate limits, both in [GitLab](https://docs.gitlab.com/security/rate_limits/) and [ADO](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/integrate/concepts/rate-limits?view=azure-devops).\n\n\nGitLab's built-in [repository importer](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/import/repo_by_url/) migrates Git repositories (commits, branches, and tags) one-by-one. Congregate is designed to preserve pull requests (known in GitLab as merge requests), comments, and related metadata where possible; the simple built-in repository import focuses only on the Git data (history, branches, and tags).\n\n\n**Items that typically require separate migration or manual recreation:**\n\n\n- Azure Pipelines - create equivalent GitLab CI/CD pipelines (consult with [CI/CD YAML](https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/) and/or with [CI/CD components](https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/components/)). Alternatively, consider using AI-based pipeline conversion available in Congregate.\n\n- Work items and boards - map to GitLab Issues, Epics, and Issue Boards.\n\n- Artifacts, container images (ACR) - migrate to GitLab Package Registry or Container Registry.\n\n- Service hooks and external integrations - recreate in GitLab.\n\n- [Permissions models](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/permissions/) differ between ADO and GitLab; review and plan permissions mapping rather than assuming exact preservation.\n\n\nReview what each tool (Congregate vs. built-in import) will migrate and choose the one that fits your needs. Make a list of any data or integrations that must be migrated or recreated manually.\n\n\n**Who will run the migration?**\n\n\nMigrations are typically run by a GitLab group owner or instance administrator, or by a designated migrator who has been granted the necessary permissions on the destination group/project. Congregate and the GitLab import APIs require valid authentication tokens for both Azure DevOps and GitLab.\n\n\n- Decide whether a group owner/admin will perform the migrations or whether you will grant a specific team/person delegated access.\n\n- Ensure the migrator has correctly configured personal access tokens (Azure DevOps and GitLab) with the scopes required by your chosen migration tool (for example, api/read_repository scopes and any tool-specific requirements). \n\n- Test tokens and permissions with a small pilot migration.\n\n**Note:** Congregate leverages file-based import functionality for ADO migrations and requires instance administrator permissions to run ([see our documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/settings/import_export/#migrate-projects-by-uploading-an-export-file)). If you are migrating to GitLab.com, consider engaging Professional Services. For more information, see the [Professional Services Full Catalog](https://about.gitlab.com/professional-services/catalog/). Non-admin account cannot preserve contribution attribution!\n\n\n**What organizational structure do we want in GitLab?**\n\nWhile it's possible to map ADO structure directly to GitLab structure, it's recommended to rationalize and simplify the structure during migration. Consider how teams will work in GitLab and design the structure to facilitate collaboration and access management. Here is a way to think about mapping ADO structure to GitLab structure:\n\n\n```mermaid\ngraph TD\n    subgraph GitLab\n        direction TB\n        A[\"Top-level Group\"]\n        B[\"Subgroup (optional)\"]\n        C[\"Projects\"]\n        A --> B\n        A --> C\n        B --> C\n    end\n\n    subgraph AzureDevOps[\"Azure DevOps\"]\n        direction TB\n        F[\"Organizations\"]\n        G[\"Projects\"]\n        H[\"Repositories\"]\n        F --> G\n        G --> H\n    end\n\n    style A fill:#FC6D26\n    style B fill:#FC6D26\n    style C fill:#FC6D26\n    style F fill:#8C929D\n    style G fill:#8C929D\n    style H fill:#8C929D\n```\n\nRecommended approach:\n\n\n- Map each ADO organization to a GitLab group (or a small set of groups), not to many small groups. Avoid creating a GitLab group for every ADO team project. Use migration as an opportunity to rationalize your GitLab structure.\n\n- Use subgroups and project-level permissions to group related repositories.\n\n- Manage access to sets of projects by using GitLab groups and group membership (groups and subgroups) rather than one group per team project.\n\n- Review GitLab [permissions](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/permissions.html) and consider [SAML Group Links](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/group/saml_sso/group_sync/) to implement an enterprise RBAC model for your GitLab instance (or a GitLab.com namespace).\n\n\n**ADO Boards and work items: State of migration**\n\n\nIt's important to understand how work items migrate from ADO into GitLab Plan (issues, epics, and boards).\n\n\n- ADO Boards and work items map to GitLab Issues, Epics, and Issue Boards. Plan how your workflows and board configurations will translate.\n\n- ADO Epics and Features become GitLab Epics.\n\n- Other work item types (e.g., user stories, tasks, bugs) become project-scoped issues.\n\n- Most standard fields are preserved; selected custom fields can be migrated when supported.\n\n- Parent-child relationships are retained so Epics reference all related issues.\n\n- Links to pull requests are converted to merge request links to maintain development traceability.\n\n\nExample: Migration of an individual work item to a GitLab Issue, including field accuracy and relationships:\n\n\n![Example: Migration of an individual work item to a GitLab Issue](https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1764769188/ztesjnxxfbwmfmtckyga.png)\n\n\nBatching guidance:\n\n\n- If you need to run migrations in batches, use your new group/subgroup structure to define batches (for example, by ADO organization or by product area).\n\n- Use inventory reports to drive batch selection and test each batch with a pilot migration before scaling.\n\n\n**Pipelines migration**\n\n\nCongregate [recently introduced](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/professional-services-automation/tools/migration/congregate/-/merge_requests/1298) AI-powered conversion for multi-stage YAML pipelines from Azure DevOps to GitLab CI/CD. This automated conversion works best for simple, single-file pipelines and is designed to provide a working starting point rather than a production-ready `.gitlab-ci.yml` file. The tool generates a functionally equivalent GitLab pipeline that you can then refine and optimize for your specific needs.\n\n\n- Converts Azure Pipelines YAML to `.gitlab-ci.yml` format automatically.\n\n- Best suited for straightforward, single-file pipeline configurations.\n\n- Provides a boilerplate to accelerate migration, not a final production artifact.\n\n- Requires review and adjustment for complex scenarios, custom tasks, or enterprise requirements.\n\n- Does not support Azure DevOps classic release pipelines — [convert these to multi-stage YAML](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/release/from-classic-pipelines?view=azure-devops) first.\n\n\nRepository owners should review the [GitLab CI/CD documentation](https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/) to further optimize and enhance their pipelines after the initial conversion.\n\n\nExample of converted pipelines:\n\n\n```yml \n\n# azure-pipelines.yml\n\ntrigger:\n  - main\n\nvariables:\n  imageName: myapp\n\nstages:\n  - stage: Build\n    jobs:\n      - job: Build\n        pool:\n          vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'\n        steps:\n          - checkout: self\n\n          - task: Docker@2\n            displayName: Build Docker image\n            inputs:\n              command: build\n              repository: $(imageName)\n              Dockerfile: '**/Dockerfile'\n              tags: |\n                $(Build.BuildId)\n\n  - stage: Test\n    jobs:\n      - job: Test\n        pool:\n          vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'\n        steps:\n          - checkout: self\n\n          # Example: run tests inside the container\n          - script: |\n              docker run --rm $(imageName):$(Build.BuildId) npm test\n            displayName: Run tests\n\n  - stage: Push\n    jobs:\n      - job: Push\n        pool:\n          vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'\n        steps:\n          - checkout: self\n\n          - task: Docker@2\n            displayName: Login to ACR\n            inputs:\n              command: login\n              containerRegistry: '\u003Cyour-acr-service-connection>'\n\n          - task: Docker@2\n            displayName: Push image to ACR\n            inputs:\n              command: push\n              repository: $(imageName)\n              tags: |\n                $(Build.BuildId)\n\n```\n\n```yaml\n\n# .gitlab-ci.yml\n\nvariables:\n  imageName: myapp\n\nstages:\n  - build\n  - test\n  - push\n\nbuild:\n  stage: build\n  image: docker:latest\n  services:\n    - docker:dind\n  script:\n    - docker build -t $imageName:$CI_PIPELINE_ID -f $(find . -name Dockerfile) .\n  only:\n    - main\n\ntest:\n  stage: test\n  image: docker:latest\n  services:\n    - docker:dind\n  script:\n    - docker run --rm $imageName:$CI_PIPELINE_ID npm test\n  only:\n    - main\n\npush:\n  stage: push\n  image: docker:latest\n  services:\n    - docker:dind\n  before_script:\n    - docker login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY\n  script:\n    - docker tag $imageName:$CI_PIPELINE_ID $CI_REGISTRY/$CI_PROJECT_PATH/$imageName:$CI_PIPELINE_ID\n    - docker push $CI_REGISTRY/$CI_PROJECT_PATH/$imageName:$CI_PIPELINE_ID\n  only:\n    - main\n\n```\n\n**Final checklist:**\n\n\n- Decide timeline and batch strategy.\n\n- Produce a full inventory of repositories, PRs, and contributors.\n\n- Choose Congregate or the built-in import based on scope (PRs and metadata vs. Git data only).\n\n- Decide who will run migrations and ensure tokens/permissions are configured.\n\n- Identify assets that must be migrated separately (pipelines, work items, artifacts, and hooks) and plan those efforts.\n\n- Run pilot migrations, validate results, then scale according to your plan.\n\n\n## Running your migrations\n\n\nAfter planning, execute migrations in stages, starting with trial runs. Trial migrations help surface org-specific issues early and let you measure duration, validate outcomes, and fine-tune your approach before production.\n\n\nWhat trial migrations validate:\n\n\n- Whether a given repository and related assets migrate successfully (history, branches, tags; plus MRs/comments if using Congregate)\n\n- Whether the destination is usable immediately (permissions, runners, CI/CD variables, integrations)\n\n- How long each batch takes, to set schedules and stakeholder expectations\n\n\nDowntime guidance:\n\n\n- GitLab's built-in Git import and Congregate do not inherently require downtime.\n\n- For production waves, freeze changes in ADO (branch protections or read-only) to avoid missed commits, PR updates, or work items created mid-migration.\n\n- Trial runs do not require freezes and can be run anytime.\n\n\nBatching guidance:\n\n\n- Run trial batches back-to-back to shorten elapsed time; let teams validate results asynchronously.\n\n- Use your planned group/subgroup structure to define batches and respect API rate limits.\n\n\nRecommended steps:\n\n\n1. Create a test destination in GitLab for trials:\n\n\n  - GitLab.com: create a dedicated group/namespace (for example, my-org-sandbox)\n\n  - Self-managed: create a top-level group or a separate test instance if needed\n\n\n2. Prepare authentication:\n\n\n  - Azure DevOps PAT with required scopes.\n\n  - GitLab Personal Access Token with api and read_repository (plus admin access for file-based imports used by Congregate).\n\n\n3. Run trial migrations:\n\n\n  - Repos only: use GitLab's built-in import (Repo by URL)\n\n  - Repos + PRs/MRs and additional assets: use Congregate\n\n\n4. Post-trial follow-up:\n\n\n  - Verify repo history, branches, tags; merge requests (if migrated), issues/epics (if migrated), labels, and relationships.\n\n  - Check permissions/roles, protected branches, required approvals, runners/tags, variables/secrets, integrations/webhooks.\n\n  - Validate pipelines (`.gitlab-ci.yml`) or converted pipelines where applicable.\n\n\n5. Ask users to validate functionality and data fidelity.\n\n6. Resolve issues uncovered during trials and update your runbooks.\n\n7. Network and security:\n\n\n  - If your destination uses IP allow lists, add the IPs of your migration host and any required runners/integrations so imports can succeed.\n\n\n8. Run production migrations in waves:\n\n\n  - Enforce change freezes in ADO during each wave.\n\n  - Monitor progress and logs; retry or adjust batch sizes if you hit rate limits.\n\n\n9. Optional: remove the sandbox group or archive it after you finish.\n\n\n\u003Cfigure class=\"video_container\">\n  \u003Ciframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/ibIXGfrVbi4?si=ZxOVnXjCF-h4Ne0N\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"true\">\u003C/iframe>\n\u003C/figure>\n\n\n## Terminology reference for GitLab and Azure DevOps\n\n| GitLab                                                           | Azure DevOps                                 | Similarities & Key Differences                                                                                                                                          |\n| ---------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |\n| Group                                                            | Organization                                 | Top-level namespace, membership, policies. ADO org contains Projects; GitLab Group contains Subgroups and Projects.                                                   |\n| Group or Subgroup                                                | Project                                      | Logical container, permissions boundary. ADO Project holds many repos; GitLab Groups/Subgroups organize many Projects.                                                |\n| Project (includes a Git repo)                                    | Repository (inside a Project)                | Git history, branches, tags. In GitLab, a \"Project\" is the repo plus issues, CI/CD, wiki, etc. One repo per Project.                                                  |\n| Merge Request (MR)                                               | Pull Request (PR)                            | Code review, discussions, approvals. MR rules include approvals, required pipelines, code owners.                                                                     |\n| Protected Branches, MR Approval Rules, Status Checks             | Branch Policies                              | Enforce reviews and checks. GitLab combines protections + approval rules + required status checks.                                                                    |\n| GitLab CI/CD                                                     | Azure Pipelines                              | YAML pipelines, stages/jobs, logs. ADO also has classic UI pipelines; GitLab centers on .gitlab-ci.yml.                                                               |\n| .gitlab-ci.yml                                                   | azure-pipelines.yml                          | Defines stages/jobs/triggers. Syntax/features differ; map jobs, variables, artifacts, and triggers.                                                                   |\n| Runners (shared/specific)                                        | Agents / Agent Pools                         | Execute jobs on machines/containers. Target via demands (ADO) vs tags (GitLab). Registration/scoping differs.                                                         |\n| CI/CD Variables (project/group/instance), Protected/Masked       | Pipeline Variables, Variable Groups, Library | Pass config/secrets to jobs. GitLab supports group inheritance and masking/protection flags.                                                                          |\n| Integrations, CI/CD Variables, Deploy Keys                       | Service Connections                          | External auth to services/clouds. Map to integrations or variables; cloud-specific helpers available.                                                                 |\n| Environments & Deployments (protected envs)                      | Environments (with approvals)                | Track deploy targets/history. Approvals via protected envs and manual jobs in GitLab.                                                                                 |\n| Releases (tag + notes)                                           | Releases (classic or pipelines)              | Versioned notes/artifacts. GitLab Release ties to tags; deployments tracked separately.                                                                               |\n| Job Artifacts                                                    | Pipeline Artifacts                           | Persist job outputs. Retention/expiry configured per job or project.                                                                                                  |\n| Package Registry (NuGet/npm/Maven/PyPI/Composer, etc.)           | Azure Artifacts (NuGet/npm/Maven, etc.)      | Package hosting. Auth/namespace differ; migrate per package type.                                                                                                     |\n| GitLab Container Registry                                        | Azure Container Registry (ACR) or others     | OCI images. GitLab provides per-project/group registries.                                                                                                             |\n| Issue Boards                                                     | Boards                                       | Visualize work by columns. GitLab boards are label-driven; multiple boards per project/group.                                                                         |\n| Issues (types/labels), Epics                                     | Work Items (User Story/Bug/Task)             | Track units of work. Map ADO types/fields to labels/custom fields; epics at group level.                                                                              |\n| Epics, Parent/Child Issues                                       | Epics/Features                               | Hierarchy of work. Schema differs; use epics + issue relationships.                                                                                                   |\n| Milestones and Iterations                                        | Iteration Paths                              | Time-boxing. GitLab Iterations (group feature) or Milestones per project/group.                                                                                       |\n| Labels (scoped labels)                                           | Area Paths                                   | Categorization/ownership. Replace hierarchical areas with scoped labels.                                                                                              |\n| Project/Group Wiki                                               | Project Wiki                                 | Markdown wiki. Backed by repos in both; layout/auth differ slightly.                                                                                                  |\n| Test reports via CI, Requirements/Test Management, integrations  | Test Plans/Cases/Runs                        | QA evidence/traceability. No 1:1 with ADO Test Plans; often use CI reports + issues/requirements.                                                                     |\n| Roles (Owner/Maintainer/Developer/Reporter/Guest) + custom roles | Access levels + granular permissions         | Control read/write/admin. Models differ; leverage group inheritance and protected resources.                                                                          |\n| Webhooks                                                         | Service Hooks                                | Event-driven integrations. Event names/payloads differ; reconfigure endpoints.                                                                                        |\n| Advanced Search                                                  | Code Search                                  | Full-text repo search. Self-managed GitLab may need Elasticsearch/OpenSearch for advanced features.                                                                   |\n","2025-12-03","2026-01-16","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749658924/Blog/Hero%20Images/securitylifecycle-light.png",[735,736],"Evgeny Rudinsky","Michael Leopard","Guide: Migrate from Azure DevOps to GitLab","Learn how to carry out the full migration from Azure DevOps to GitLab using GitLab Professional Services migration tools — from planning and execution to post-migration follow-up tasks.",{"featured":24,"template":13,"slug":740},"migration-from-azure-devops-to-gitlab",{"promotions":742},[743,757,768],{"id":744,"categories":745,"header":747,"text":748,"button":749,"image":754},"ai-modernization",[746],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":750,"config":751},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":752,"dataGaName":753,"dataGaLocation":237},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":755},{"src":756},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":758,"categories":759,"header":760,"text":748,"button":761,"image":765},"devops-modernization",[721,553],"Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":762,"config":763},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":764,"dataGaName":753,"dataGaLocation":237},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":766},{"src":767},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":769,"categories":770,"header":772,"text":748,"button":773,"image":777},"security-modernization",[771],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":774,"config":775},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":776,"dataGaName":753,"dataGaLocation":237},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":778},{"src":779},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"header":781,"blurb":782,"button":783,"secondaryButton":788},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":784,"config":785},"Get your free trial",{"href":786,"dataGaName":44,"dataGaLocation":787},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":489,"config":789},{"href":48,"dataGaName":49,"dataGaLocation":787},1772652094252]