Consolidate your GitLab stack with Gitaly on Kubernetes

GitLab 18.11 introduced the general availability of Gitaly on Kubernetes, allowing teams to fully integrate their GitLab components within Kubernetes environments without relying on virtual machines for Gitaly. This advancement simplifies operations by eliminating the complexities of a hybrid architecture. However, transitioning Gitaly to Kubernetes required overcoming challenges related to Git operations' memory-intensive nature and the unpredictable usage patterns that could lead to out-of-memory events. To address these, Gitaly processes run in dedicated cgroups, and Kubernetes Pods are configured to handle cgroupfs writes and Pod restarts effectively. A key improvement involves configurable client retries, ensuring minimal downtime during Pod upgrades despite the abrupt nature of Kubernetes Pod restarts. Testing demonstrated nearly identical success rates for Git operations between virtual machines and Kubernetes environments. While high availability via Gitaly Cluster (Praefect) is not yet available for Kubernetes, its development is underway. This integration allows users to consolidate their GitLab infrastructure entirely within Kubernetes for a streamlined, Kubernetes-native deployment using the GitLab Helm chart.

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