Deploying the world's largest GitLab instance 12 times daily

Take a deep dive into the code-to-production pipeline, including progressive rollouts, Canary strategies, database migrations, and multiversion compatibility.Every day, GitLab deploys code changes to the world's largest GitLab instance — GitLab.com — up to 12 times without any downtime. We use GitLab's own CI/CD platform to manage these deployments, which impact millions of developers worldwide. This deployment frequency serves as our primary quality gate and stress test. It also means our customers get access to new features within hours of development rather than waiting weeks or months. When organizations depend on GitLab for their DevOps workflows, they're using a platform that's proven at scale on our own infrastructure. In this article, you'll learn how we built an automated deployment pipeline using core GitLab CI/CD functionality to handle this deployment complexity. .