All work
Developer Platform
GitLab at Scale
GitLabCI/CDAutomationGovernance
As the number of repositories grows, manual governance stops scaling. Access requests, pipeline templates and branch protection rules that made sense for ten repositories become a liability at a few hundred.
The challenge
The main challenge was consistency without becoming a bottleneck — enforcing sane defaults across many repositories and teams without turning every project into a request that had to go through a central team.
Approach
- Standardized CI/CD pipeline templates so teams start from a secure, working baseline.
- Automated repository and access governance instead of handling requests manually.
- Codified branch protection and review requirements as policy rather than tribal knowledge.
- Kept the system self-service so teams could move without waiting on a gatekeeper.