Bring your own model to GitLab Duo Self-Hosted with Microsoft Foundry

GitLab Duo Self-Hosted enables organizations with data sovereignty, residency, or regulatory requirements to connect GitLab AI features to models hosted on infrastructure they control, including Microsoft Foundry deployments in Azure. The architecture routes requests from a self-managed GitLab instance through a locally installed AI Gateway to one or more Foundry model endpoints, allowing separate models to be assigned to functions such as code completion, code generation, agentic chat, and the Agent Platform. Foundry provides access to several model families, including GPT, Claude, Llama, and Mistral, but organizations must verify both GitLab feature support and Foundry availability because catalog presence does not ensure compatibility. In fully self-hosted configurations, inference data remains within the organization’s controlled infrastructure, although online licenses transmit limited billing metadata to GitLab, while Azure inference residency depends on the selected regional, data-zone, or global deployment type. Implementation involves deploying eligible models in Foundry, installing and configuring the AI Gateway, adding endpoint credentials and deployment identifiers in GitLab, mapping models to features, and validating connectivity through health checks, code-generation tests, and gateway logs. The guidance recommends starting with a single broadly supported model, measuring quality, latency, usage, and cost with representative workloads, then introducing specialized or smaller models where evidence supports the trade-offs.

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