Case Study: University of Washington achieves scalable control and flexibility to manage 10,000+ projects with GitLab

The Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering gains control and flexibility to easily manage 10,000+ projects

The University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering was struggling with a slow, ad-hoc Subversion setup and fragile homegrown scripts that led students and faculty to use external Git hosts—sometimes exposing coursework publicly. With rapid growth in users and projects and a need for federated login and stronger access controls, the school evaluated several self-hosted options and chose GitLab to meet its collaboration and security requirements.

By deploying a self-hosted GitLab instance and building SSO and provisioning tools on its API, the Allen School centralized control and scaled effectively: GitLab now hosts over 10,000 projects (~400 GB) for roughly 1,500 users, one software engineer supports about 2,000 users, and maintenance takes just 1–2 days per quarter. GitLab’s scalability and open APIs enabled secure course provisioning, wider faculty adoption, and measurable improvements in manageability and teaching workflows.

University of Washington

Aaron Timss

Director of Information Technology