Case Study: SURF (Dutch science & research cooperative) achieves 1400% faster deployments and a single source of truth with GitLab Premium

How SURF increased deployment speed by 1400%

SURF, a Dutch cooperative supporting over 100 research and education institutions, faced fragmented tooling and poor collaboration—teams used SVN, GitHub, and GitLab CE across many on‑prem installs and lacked a single source of truth and unified user/repository management. To address this, SURF adopted GitLab Premium as its centralized platform.

Using GitLab Premium on‑prem with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Ansible) and Kubernetes integration (via GitLab runners), SURF automated cluster provisioning and deployments. The results: deployment speed increased ~1400% (from two weeks to as little as one day in worst cases), product clusters can be created in ~25 minutes, merge requests rose from 10 to about 20 per day, and SURF now runs 20+ Kubernetes clusters with 300+ nodes—improving developer throughput and cross‑team collaboration thanks to GitLab.

SURF

Giuseppe Gianquitto

Cloud Lead Architect, Research and Development Services