GitLab Dedicated

GitLab Dedicated is a fully isolated, single-tenant SaaS service that is:

Hosted and managed by GitLab, Inc.
Deployed on AWS in a cloud region of your choice. See unavailable AWS regions.

GitLab Dedicated removes the overhead of platform management to increase your operational efficiency, reduce risk, and enhance the speed and agility of your organization. Each GitLab Dedicated instance is highly available with disaster recovery and deployed into the cloud region of your choice. GitLab teams fully manage the maintenance and operations of each isolated instance, so customers can access our latest product improvements while meeting the most complex compliance standards.

It’s the offering of choice for enterprises and organizations in highly regulated industries that have complex regulatory, compliance, and data residency requirements.

Available features

Data residency

GitLab Dedicated allows you to select the cloud region where your data will be stored. Upon onboarding, choose the cloud region where you want to deploy your Dedicated instance. Some AWS regions have limited features and as a result, we are not able to deploy production instances to those regions. See below for the list of unavailable AWS regions.

Availability and scalability

GitLab Dedicated leverages the GitLab Cloud Native Hybrid reference architectures with high availability enabled. When onboarding, GitLab will match you to the closest reference architecture size based on your number of users. Learn about the current Service Level Objective.

Disaster Recovery

When onboarding to GitLab Dedicated, you can provide a Secondary AWS region in which your data is stored. This region is used to recover your GitLab Dedicated instance in case of a disaster. Regular backups of all GitLab Dedicated datastores (including Database and Git repositories) are taken and tested regularly and stored in your desired secondary region. GitLab Dedicated also provides the ability to store copies of these backups in a separate cloud region of choice for greater redundancy.

For more information, read about the recovery plan for GitLab Dedicated as well as RPO and RTO targets. These targets are available only when both the primary and secondary regions are supported by GitLab Dedicated. See below for a list of unavailable AWS regions for GitLab Dedicated.

Security

Authentication and authorization

GitLab Dedicated supports instance-level SAML OmniAuth functionality. Your GitLab Dedicated instance acts as the service provider, and you must provide the necessary configuration in order for GitLab to communicate with your IdP. For more information, see how to configure SAML for your instance.

SAML request signing, group sync, and SAML groups are supported.

Secure networking

GitLab Dedicated offers public connectivity by default with support for IP allowlists. You can optionally specify a list of IP addresses that can access your GitLab Dedicated instance. Subsequently, when an IP not on the allowlist tries to access your instance the connection is refused.

Private connectivity via AWS PrivateLink is also offered as an option. Both inbound and outbound PrivateLinks are supported. When connecting to internal resources over an outbound PrivateLink with non public certificates, you can specify a list of certificates that are trusted by GitLab. These certificates can be provided when updating your instance configuration.

Encryption

Data is encrypted at rest and in transit using the latest encryption standards.

Bring your own key encryption

During onboarding, you can specify an AWS KMS encryption key stored in your own AWS account that GitLab uses to encrypt the data for your Dedicated instance. This gives you full control over the data you store in GitLab.

Compliance

Certifications

GitLab Dedicated offers the following compliance certifications:

SOC 2 Type 1 Report (Security and Confidentiality criteria)
ISO/IEC 27001:2013
ISO/IEC 27017:2015
ISO/IEC 27018:2019

Isolation

As a single-tenant SaaS service, GitLab Dedicated provides infrastructure-level isolation of your GitLab environment. Your environment is placed into a separate AWS account from other tenants. This AWS account contains all of the underlying infrastructure necessary to host the GitLab application and your data stays within the account boundary. You administer the application while GitLab manages the underlying infrastructure. Tenant environments are also completely isolated from GitLab.com.

Access controls

GitLab Dedicated adheres to the principle of least privilege to control access to customer tenant environments. Tenant AWS accounts live under a top-level GitLab Dedicated AWS parent organization. Access to the AWS Organization is restricted to select GitLab team members. All user accounts within the AWS Organization follow the overall GitLab Access Management Policy outlined here. Direct access to customer tenant environments is restricted to a single Hub account. The GitLab Dedicated Control Plane uses the Hub account to perform automated actions over tenant accounts when managing environments. Similarly, GitLab Dedicated engineers do not have direct access to customer tenant environments. In break glass situations, where access to resources in the tenant environment is required to address a high-severity issue, GitLab engineers must go through the Hub account to manage those resources. This is done via an approval process, and after permission is granted, the engineer will assume an IAM role on a temporary basis to access tenant resources through the Hub account. All actions within the hub account and tenant account are logged to CloudTrail.

Inside tenant accounts, GitLab leverages Intrusion Detection and Malware Scanning capabilities from AWS GuardDuty. Infrastructure logs are monitored by the GitLab Security Incident Response Team to detect anomalous events.

Audit and observability

GitLab Dedicated provides access to audit and system logs generated by the application.

Maintenance

GitLab leverages weekly maintenance windows to keep your instance up to date, fix security issues, and ensure the overall reliability and performance of your environment.

Upgrades

GitLab performs monthly upgrades to your instance with the latest security release during your preferred maintenance window tracking one release behind the latest GitLab release. For example, if the latest version of GitLab available is 15.8, GitLab Dedicated runs on 15.7.

Unscheduled maintenance

GitLab may conduct unscheduled maintenance to address high-severity issues affecting the security, availability, or reliability of your instance.

Application

GitLab Dedicated comes with the self-managed Ultimate feature set with the exception of the unsupported features listed below.

GitLab Runners

With GitLab Dedicated, you must install the GitLab Runner application on infrastructure that you own or manage. If hosting GitLab Runners on AWS, you can avoid having requests from the Runner fleet route through the public internet by setting up a secure connection from the Runner VPC to the GitLab Dedicated endpoint via AWS Private Link. Learn more about networking options.

Migration

To help you migrate your data to GitLab Dedicated, you can choose from the following options:

When migrating from another GitLab instance, you can either:
- Use the UI, including group import and project import.
- Use APIs, including the group import API and project import API.
- Note: Import functionality behind a feature flag (such as bulk_import_project) is not supported in GitLab Dedicated.
When migrating from third-party services, you can use the GitLab importers.
You can perform a fully-automated migration through the Congregate Automation Tool, which supports migrating from existing GitLab instances as well as third-party services.

Features that are not available

GitLab application features

The following GitLab application features are not available:

LDAP, Smartcard, or Kerberos authentication
Multiple login providers
Advanced search
GitLab Pages
FortiAuthenticator, or FortiToken 2FA
Reply-by email
Service Desk
GitLab-managed runners (hosted runners)
GitLab AI capabilities (Refer to our direction page for more information)
Features other than available features that must be configured outside of the GitLab user interface including those behind feature flags

The following features will not be supported:

Mattermost
Server-side Git hooks. GitLab Dedicated is a SaaS service, and access to the underlying infrastructure is only available to GitLab Inc. team members. Due to the nature of server side configuration, there is a possible security concern of running arbitrary code on Dedicated services, as well as the possible impact that can have on the service SLA. Use the alternative push rules or webhooks instead.