At 4data, we’re thrilled to announce a new chapter in our story: we’ve officially partnered with GitLab.

More than just a formal press release

My own journey with GitLab goes back to its earliest days. Back when I was working as a Ruby on Rails developer and system engineer, my team was stuck with SVN. I already knew and loved Git and GitHub from my part-time studies, but using external services wasn’t allowed — we had to host everything ourselves.

So I went hunting for a better option - ideally something built with Ruby on Rails. That’s when I found GitLab. Back then, it wasn’t backed by a company. There was no Omnibus installer. Just a raw Rails app you had to deploy and maintain yourself. But once I got it running, I was hooked. It felt like the right tool for our team: powerful, flexible and developer-friendly.

My first attempt to bring GitLab to a customer? A disaster.

The customer had their own homegrown web-based Git viewer, and I convinced them to give GitLab a shot. But the environment was air-gapped. That meant manually downloading every Gem dependency and copying them over to the server. It was a maintenance nightmare. I had to admit: GitLab just wasn’t ready for this use case back then.

But things moved fast. GitLab introduced the Omnibus installer. They launched their first commercial offerings. My colleagues and I became strong advocates, and many of our customers adopted GitLab based on our guidance. At one point, we were running one of the larger self-hosted GitLab instances in Switzerland (at least, it felt that way). Still, my employer at the time didn’t see a business opportunity, so it remained just a passion project.

Fast forward to today

4data has grown into a DevOps consulting company and managed service provider. We help our customers build, scale, and operate modern development environments. Offering GitLab as a managed service was a natural step and partnering with GitLab was the logical next move.

We are proud to be a new GitLab Partner, but our experience with GitLab goes way back. Over the years, we’ve helped countless customers deploy, run, and maintain GitLab — from small teams to large-scale, enterprise-grade environments.

That’s why we believe we’re the right partner for you if you want to run your GitLab instance as a managed service. Whether you're just getting started or looking to improve your current setup, we provide the expertise, reliability, and support to make GitLab work for you.

Through this partnership, we gain access to better support, resources and collaboration with GitLab themselves. That means we can deliver even more value to our customers — whether it’s setting up secure CI/CD pipelines, running GitLab in complex enterprise environments or ensuring high availability and compliance.

So yes, I’m genuinely excited to announce: 4data is now an official GitLab Partner.

For me, this isn’t just about business. It’s the continuation of a journey that started with a scrappy Rails app and a developer looking for a better way to work. Now, we as 4data, are helping others do the same — at scale.