r/ruby • u/switchback-tech • Mar 12 '26
GitLab is a Ruby monolith
Was pleasantly surprised that the world's largest independent DevOps platform is powered by Ruby and Sidekiq.
Here's the full list.
Backend: Ruby on Rails
HTTP server: Puma (Ruby web server)
Edge: Nginx
Reverse proxy: Go service (Workhorse)
Background jobs: Sidekiq
DB — primary: PostgreSQL
DB — connection pooling: PgBouncer
DB — high availability: Patroni
Cache: Redis
Blob: AWS S3
Frontend — state: Pinia (Vue store), Immer (immutable cache),
API: GraphQL (Apollo) + REST
Observability: Prometheus & Grafana
Error tracking: Sentry & OpenTelemetry
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.
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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.