Case Study: GitLab achieves reliable, high-performance, and cost-efficient infrastructure with Data Foundry

GitLab - Customer Case Study

GitLab, an open-source software development platform founded in 2011, grew into a global service and closely monitors and documents its IT evolution to help others. As the company scaled, it faced capacity and performance problems with NFS appliances and built CephFS clusters, but running a high‑performance distributed filesystem in the cloud exposed severe IO latency and database outages—cloud timesharing produced unpredictable latency and steep costs for higher performance.

To address this, GitLab moved to owning its own infrastructure: despite upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, the shift delivered more consistent, efficient, and reliable performance than the cloud at scale. They concluded the cloud is cost‑effective at small scale but becomes ineffective and expensive under heavy IOPS, and they continue to share their growing‑pain learnings to guide other companies.

GitLab

Pablo Carranza

Production Engineer