Why use managed services for GitLab hosting?

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Why use managed services for GitLab hosting?

Matthew Hope

Published on April 16, 2026

6 min read

Matthew Hope

Published on April 16, 2026

6 min read

Maintenance and operations can strain resources. Discover how managed services for GitLab hosting can maximise your platform's potential while easing the burden on your team.

If your priority is using GitLab, rather than maintaining the platform and its infrastructure, then managed services are ideal. GitLab can transform your DevOps approach and accelerate your digital transformation. And managed services help you get the most out of your investment, freeing you up to focus on what matters most.

By outsourcing manual day-to-day support, your developers and teams can focus on critical, big-picture tasks, driving productivity and innovation across your whole organisation.

At Adaptavist, our managed services are long-term support and operations offerings. As a GitLab Select Channel Partner, we can provide the expertise and ongoing support you need to keep this powerhouse tool on track.

Our GitLab managed services

Some of the benefits of managed services include:

24/7 support

The day-to-day running of your tools are taken care of, including infrastructure, upgrades, patches, and user support – even when you’re sleeping.

A more secure system

They ensure you’re meeting regulatory requirements and that your tool environments are protected, up to date (see below), and have effective access controls.

Optimise your resources

Offloading everyday operations reduces the burden on your teams. This improves employee satisfaction, prevents burnout, and frees your people up to work on creating value instead.

Scale without compromise

Your managed service partner can help you scale infrastructure, users, and workflows when you need it, without it impacting performance.

Get there faster

Forget long setup times and steep learning curves. Managed services means you get stable environments that are built to run fast – so you get value straight away.

Reduced risk and downtime

Incrementally improving GitLab with regular upgrades prevents the complexity, cost, and potential downtime associated with large disruptive upgrade jumps.

Why you should keep GitLab up to date

One of the biggest wins managed services brings is ensuring you’re always using the latest version of GitLab. Upgrades are a core component of all our managed service packages (see below). Staying up to date isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s an essential part of getting the most out of GitLab, and here’s why:

Stronger security

The latest version of GitLab means the latest security patches, vulnerability fixes, and compliance enhancements. It reduces risks of a security breach and ensures you’re meeting your regulatory requirements.

Access to all the latest features

Without staying up to date, you’ll miss out on GitLab’s latest features across planning, CI/CD, security, and portfolio management, including GitLab Duo Agentic Platform (DAP) for AI-assisted workflows.

Greater speed and stability

Maintaining and updating GitLab ensures optimisation doesn’t end at implementation. Your managed service partner can continuously stay on top of pipeline speed, reliability, and system stability.

Compatibility with your stack

GitLab isn’t your only tool, so it’s vital it stays aligned with your stack, cloud providers, and supported dependencies. Failing to upgrade means failure to integrate it effectively with your other tools.

A better user experience

For GitLab to thrive at your organisation, you want your developers to use it. The latest version has UI refinements and workflow enhancements designed to increase developer productivity.

No nasty surprises

Incrementally improving GitLab with regular upgrades prevents the complexity, cost, and potential downtime associated with large disruptive upgrade jumps.

Upgrade your GitLab instance with Adaptavist

Falling behind in GitLab upgrades? Our managed upgrade path helps you adopt DAP with regular scheduled upgrades, keeping your environment secure and stable, and giving you access to all the latest features.

Find out more

GitLab services, expertly managed

GitLab offers a fully managed, single-tenant SaaS version. It’s called GitLab Dedicated, and it’s designed for organisations that want all the benefits of a cloud service, but still need the control, data residency, and compliance rigour of a private deployment.

GitLab Dedicated will suffice for some organisations. However, at Adaptavist, we offer a wider suite of services to suit our customers’ complex needs. They include:

GitLab Local

Aimed at small to medium enterprises (SMEs), GitLab Local includes a simple migration, hosting, and an upgrade to the latest version of GitLab, with ongoing account support. Post migration, you get major version and security upgrades too.

GitLab Upgrade

Don’t need fully managed services but want consistent expert-led upgrades? GitLab Upgrade helps you adopt DAP with regular scheduled upgrades, keeping your environment secure and stable, and giving you access to all the latest features.

GitLab Operate

This is fully managed, end-to-end operational support, backed by world-class infrastructure management. Our expert advice, global assistance, and day-to-day maintenance help you reduce costs, minimise downtime, and ensure optimal performance and user productivity for your GitLab tools.

GitLab Assist

Our GitLab Assist services mean premium front-end support, admin support, CI/CD pipeline configuration, project management, data management, artefact management, security management, and incident management. We provide seamless software administration – you get reliable, always-accessible tools.

Across all our services, we offer SLA-backed support (with 24/7/365 availability on select packages), backup and disaster recovery, security patching and upgrades, and admin support and configuration. Our approach includes proactive monitoring. And we can help with licensing if required.

Why Adaptavist?

We’re proud to be a GitLab Select Partner and a GitLab Professional Services Partner, recognised for our expertise in delivering services and support to GitLab customers.

This recognition means we’ve got a breadth of expertise in DevOps and managed services. We’ve seen every issue before, so we know how to fix them. And we know GitLab inside out, so we can help you unlock its full potential with industry-proven techniques and strategic guidance.

We’re also a strategic AWS partner, optimising your cloud infrastructure and hosting environment to leverage best practices and meet your organisation’s requirements.

A few more things to know about us:

We’re the experts – we’ve got extensive experience in large-scale DevOps transformations, deep technical knowledge, and the ability to integrate all your other tools.
We can take care of everything (or not) – our solutions are comprehensive and customisable, covering all the support you might need.
We’re always here to help – from outages to routine admin tasks, we’re available round the clock. And our support is backed by strict SLAs for first response and time to resolution.
We’re super speedy – we’re proud to help organisations get up and running really quickly, so your people can get on focusing on delivery.
We’re on your team – we offer ongoing guidance to improve your DevOps workflows, security, and speed. It’s a strategic partnership, not a helpdesk.

Get us on your GitLab team

Tick GitLab maintenance and operations off your list with our managed services from Adaptavist. Find out more about what we offer and how we can help.

Discover our GitLab managed services

Written by

Matthew Hope

Global Cloud Practice Lead

Matt joined Adaptavist in 2014 as a Senior DevOps engineer and is now Global Cloud Practice Lead. He has experience in infrastructure, system automation, all things Linux and software support, and he is passionate about delivering customer value

DevOps

GitLab

Managed Services

Cloud