A new era, new values… and a new organization: work is underway at GitLab.
The era in question is the age of agentic coding. The values, expressed in English, are “Speed and Quality”, “Ownership mindset” and “Customer outcomes”. They replace the CREDIT framework (Collaboration; Results for Customers; Efficiency; Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging; Iteration; Transparency). We thus formally lose diversity and transparency.
At the organizational level, GitLab plans, notably:
- Reduce, by as much as 30%, the number of countries covered in direct operations (roughly sixty today)
- Overhaul R&D (toward around sixty independent teams, i.e., nearly twice as many as today)
- Incorporate AI agents into internal processes… and resize the workforce accordingly
- Slim middle management (up to three levels in certain functions)
GitLab aims, where possible, to have laid down the new foundations no later than June 1. It opened, until May 18, a window for voluntary departures. Details on the scope and the financial impact will be provided in early June, during the quarterly results.
From the Rails monolith to microservices: removing NFS from the equation
For its 2026 fiscal year, ended January 31, GitLab posted €955 million in revenue (+26% year over year). Its gross margin stood at 87% (down 2 percentage points). Operating income remains negative at $70 million, though the loss was halved. The stock price, which had been above $50 in early November, now hovers around $25.
AI, and especially agentic AI, reduces the cost of producing software and thereby, GitLab believes, increases demand. In this light, the company commits to revising the platform’s infrastructure. Today, it remains a Rails monolith with various ancillary services (Gitaly, GitLab Shell, GitLab Pages…). Some facets of cloud-native architecture have been adopted, but there is still a long way to go.
To foster containerization, GitLab intends, among other steps, to remove dependencies on NFS that some services rely on. GitLab Pages and the build logs are the primary targets.
For the moment, there are no plans to shift stateful services to a cloud-native environment. Yet they will be aligned, starting with the main database (Postgres). This implies implementing upgrades with minimal downtime—at most a failover. In another vein, they will need to determine GitLab.com’s disaster-recovery needs, given that the objective is to adapt the Geo component currently used on self-hosted instances.
GitLab is exploring, for 2027-2028, “à la carte” features for its Premium subscription (artifact management, secrets management…). In mid-January, it hit an agentic milestone by launching Duo Agent Platform. Along with this, a hybrid business model has emerged, combining per-seat pricing with usage-based billing. At the latest check, 70% of its revenue comes from supporting self-hosted deployments.
