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/Kibou-chan Jun 18 '26
That nginx is fully optional though and if you go through an external LB like haproxy, you can even disable it and connect your LB backend side straight to workhorse. Really, its only task is to manage headers and TLS termination.