GitLab Service Ownership Policy

Purpose

This policy establishes service ownership within the engineering organization for customer-facing services, outlining responsibilities and ownership structure.

Scope

This policy applies specifically to customer-facing services and the underlying infrastructure services that support them.

Service Ownership

Customer Facing Services

Reliability::General

• Contains all customer-facing services tied to the monolith architecture.
• Responsibilities include design, development, deployment, and operational stability.
• Ensuring alignment with organizational standards and meeting service level objectives (SLOs) for customer-facing services.

Reliability::Practices

• Contains all services that require designated engineering resources and expertise.
• Responsibilities include design, development, deployment, and operational stability of these services.
• Collaboration with the General Team, relevant stakeholders, and development teams to ensure compliance with organizational standards, overall system architecture, and specialized requirements.
• Higher level of collaboration between the Infrastructure and Development factions to leverage expertise, align goals, and optimize service delivery.

Infrastructure Services

The Reliability Team maintains responsibility for the underlying infrastructure on which customer-facing services run. This includes:

• Network infrastructure
• Compute resources
• Storage systems
• Security and access controls
• Monitoring and observability systems

Collaboration between service owners and development teams in establishing and scaling the underlying infrastructure is vital for ensuring efficient service operations and meeting availability SLAs.