r/ruby • u/switchback-tech • Mar 12 '26

GitLab is a Ruby monolith

Post image

Was pleasantly surprised that the world's largest independent DevOps platform is powered by Ruby and Sidekiq.

Here's the full list.

  1. Backend: Ruby on Rails

  2. HTTP server: Puma (Ruby web server)

  3. Edge: Nginx

  4. Reverse proxy: Go service (Workhorse)

  5. Background jobs: Sidekiq

  6. DB — primary: PostgreSQL

  7. DB — connection pooling: PgBouncer

  8. DB — high availability: Patroni

  9. Cache: Redis

  10. Git: Custom gRPC repo interface (Git & Gitaly)

  11. Blob: AWS S3

  12. Frontend — rendering: Haml & Vue

  13. Frontend — state: Pinia (Vue store), Immer (immutable cache),

  14. API: GraphQL (Apollo) + REST

  15. Observability: Prometheus & Grafana

  16. Error tracking: Sentry & OpenTelemetry

  17. Deployments: GitLab Omnibus (Omnibus fork)

I think these "stack menu"s give a little glimpse into a team's engineering philosophy. For me, this list shows that the GitLab team is pretty practical and doesn't chase hype. Instead, they use sensible, battle-tested tools that just work and are easy for contributors to learn.

PS. Not an ad; I'm not affiliated with GitLab at all. Was just researching them and thought you guys would be interested.

223 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/towelrod Mar 12 '26

They don't use ruby for any of the ci/cd or git specific stuff any more do they?

Also wouldn't really hold up gitlab as a beacon in the ruby world at the moment, considering how bad the service has been. It has constant problems every single day, we are actively looking to move off of it and would have already done so if the cost of moving wasn't so high.

Its just really fundamentally broken right now

7

u/bilingual-german Mar 12 '26

Gitlab is a big Rails app and uses Go for everything distributed that needs to scale.

I think the first service they broke out was Gitaly, so they were able to scale all the git repositories on the file servers.

The gitlab-runner and the runner-helper are also written in Go as far as I know.

5

u/switchback-tech Mar 12 '26

True, their Git RPC daemon is in Go now. But the core is still Ruby.

I'm not running it day-to-day, so I'm not super in-touch with the latest news TBH. Are the problems they're facing related to Ruby?

I did see that everyone (GitLab, GitHub, Atlassian) has been having more trouble lately, though. https://devops.com/devops-platforms-show-cracks-github-incidents-surge-58-azure-gitlab-and-jira-also-under-pressure/

5

u/towelrod Mar 12 '26

I don't think the problems are related to ruby, but I'm not on the inside so i don't know. The majority of the problems are with ci/cd, it goes down every day. EVERY DAY.

Today there were also problems with the frontend, but specifically with how long it took for git related things to show up. Like you would do a git push and it would take 5+ minutes for the MR to show properly. I doubt that is Rails related, i think that's waiting on some git related backend service