From our work
An orphaned GitLab, two major versions behind?
A GitLab instance with more than 300 projects that nobody looked after any more
Starting point
At a software manufacturer in measurement technology, all development depended on a self-hosted GitLab instance: more than 300 projects with their issue history. The colleague who had looked after it was no longer there. Nobody knew whether a backup would hold up in an emergency.
What we did
Analysis first, then safety: we set up backups and proved recovery before anything was changed. After that came the migration, runners included, to a reproducible on-premises setup with Ansible, plus monitoring.
Result
Migrated without data loss. The instance can be rebuilt from code instead of only from one person's memory.
What remains
Runbooks for the recurring tasks and training for the team.