This is not intended as a replacement for self-hosting. We plan to continue offering that.

Thank god...

I don't see this as an attempt to kill off their self-hosted offering. They charge the same as their SaaS version with some slight differences in features/limits (limits being removed as they're offloaded to your infrastructure.) The self-hosted version should in theory have a better profit margin than their SaaS version. Seems like the Gitlab Dedicated offering is probably just their self-hosted version automated and hosted on Gitlab infrastructure. Appears the demand was there and it probably wasn't much extra work to make it happen so why not.

I don’t think GitLab will do this as they would lose many government customers that self-host on private networks.

This sure looks like an attempt to move those into this solution.

GitLab team member here. No, it's not. This service will not be replacing our self-hosted versions.

At least for the US government, that's not going to happen. The government controls the servers is a non-negotiable contract term. We even have our own AWS regions for US government work.

Nah, that's looser than you think. Contractors deploy to the government cloud regions on AWS and Azure all the time. There's no reason GitLab can't become a qualified contractor and gain access.

The government cloud regions are way more about meeting compliance with all levels of FedRAMP and DoD requirements. Such as exclusively only US Citizens may access the systems even on the cloud hosts staff (so no foreign/remote/visa employees) and a whole list of other requirements both big, small and annoying (like FIPS) that affects everything from software to the physical building.

GitLab has already confirmed in comments here that removing self-hosted isn’t something they’re going to do.

That said, as you note yourself, the government is perfectly fine w/ not controlling the servers. GitLab could offer single-tenant (or heck, even multi-tenant) SaaS in AWS GovCloud and sell to government customers.

I bet differently. Gov CIOs are being forced to adapt to rapid business solutioning and minimal overhead. It takes years to operationalize a Gitlab instance, and then requires permanent O&M less adaptive to IT cultural shift.

Gov IT leaders will move to Gitlab SaaS overnight, once it's FedRAMP approved and migration is enabled through a click of a button.

Maybe less favorable for AWS and their contracts oriented to long-term gov owned compute.

There’s plenty of people that want dedicated deployments without having to manage the details of the deployment and upgrades. Especially those that already run their core on one of the target cloud platforms.

They would lose us, that's for sure

Gitlab has invested pretty heavily into being able to self host virtually anywhere.

If they aren't committed to it they are certainly investing a lot of time into doing it well.

To be fair so was Atlassian. It just takes the CEO seeing the amount of money they'll make and save from pushing their customers to SaaS to change the direction for the company.

It's usually not a money thing, it's that the customers are usually unable to maintain the service internally resulting in extremely outdated, insecure, and poor performing versions of your product everywhere generating a lot of support issues and bad vibes around your product.

I think that's fair but on the flip side there's ways of handling on prem much better than Atlassian does. GitHub would be a good example of that. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.