Case Study: European Space Agency achieves rapid, collaborative mission software delivery with GitLab

How the European Space Agency uses GitLab to focus on space missions

The European Space Agency (ESA) coordinates Europe’s space programmes but struggled with geographically distributed teams, heterogeneous version control (Subversion/CVS) and slow, fragmented software delivery. To modernize its mission-operations software lifecycle, ESA validated and adopted GitLab as its central code repository platform (and later GitLab CI) beginning in 2016–2017 to enable secure, standardized collaboration across sites.

GitLab delivered a centralized Git platform plus integrated CI/CD (GitLab CI), simplifying the toolchain and automating deployments. As a result, ESA now runs ~1,500 projects across 140 groups, with ~15% of employees actively using GitLab and 60,000+ CI jobs executed; code deploys that once took weeks now complete in minutes. GitLab’s solution boosted collaboration, increased synergy exploitation, reduced tool maintenance overhead and freed IT resources for higher‑value work.

European Space Agency

Bruno Sousa

Spacecraft Operations Manager