Team History
Overview
This page documents the history and evolution of the Infrastructure Platforms teams and organizational structure.
Scalability Group History
The Scalability Group was a specialized team within the Infrastructure department that focused on ensuring GitLab’s infrastructure could scale to meet growing demands. The team was responsible for GitLab at scale, working on the highest priority scaling items related to our SaaS platforms.
Origins and Formation
The Scalability team became a reality during the fourth organizational iteration in the Infrastructure department on August 22, 2019, although it only became operational once the first team member joined on November 29, 2019.
The team’s origins were connected to the Delivery team, with the first backend engineers with Infrastructure specialization previously being part of that team. They had a focus on reliability improvements for GitLab.com, often working on features with significant scaling considerations.
Context for Creation
Throughout July, August, and September 2019, GitLab.com experienced a higher than normal amount of customer-facing incidents, including mirroring delays, slowdowns, and vertical node scaling issues. This placed higher expectations on the Infrastructure department and highlighted the need for a dedicated team focused on scalability.
The “infradev” and “rapid action” processes were created as connection points between Infrastructure and Development departments to help prioritize higher impact issues. However, it became clear that a more strategic, long-term approach was needed.
Mission and Vision
The Scalability group’s mission was to enhance the availability, reliability, and performance of GitLab’s SaaS platforms by observing the application’s capabilities to operate at scale. The team analyzed application performance, recognized bottlenecks in service availability, proposed and developed short-term improvements, and developed long-term plans to help drive decisions of other Engineering teams.
Key Contributions
The team delivered significant impact throughout its existence:
- Background processing architectural changes that had a large impact on GitLab.com
- Numerous incremental improvements throughout 2020 and beyond
- Development of reliable impact measurement and future challenge prediction methodologies
- Collaboration with stage groups on scalability review requests and infradev process engagement
Year-by-year overviews of the team’s impact were documented in:
Organizational Evolution
Over time, the responsibilities and focus areas of the Scalability Group were reorganized and distributed across other specialized teams within Infrastructure Platforms to better align with the current operational structure and strategic priorities.
Current Organization
For information about the current Infrastructure Platforms organization structure, team composition, and responsibilities, please refer to the Infrastructure Platforms main page.
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