Exercise: Technical Barriers to Being Generational - Architecture for the next decade
The Challenge
As we execute our current strategy of strengthening the foundation through quality improvements and the "ilities" framework, we must simultaneously prepare for the architectural decisions that will define GitLab's next decade. While we're addressing immediate scalability, reliability, and performance issues, we need to identify the deeper structural changes required to support truly generational growth.
What We Need From You
Based on known challenges (Haml -> Vue, Vue3 migration), existing known work (CI Functions) and where you see the company headed over the next 5 years, we will seek to identify the top 5-10 architectural projects that must be prioritized over the next year. Over the next 2 weeks, please form an opinion or list based on the following questions:
- Re-architecture Candidates: Which components in your domain (Create/Plan/CI-CD/Package/Verify) are approaching fundamental limits that incremental improvements cannot solve?
- Decade-Scale: What architectural decisions are required in order to accomplish 10x our current scale?
- Technology Shifts: Which emerging paradigms (AI-native workflows, Git replacements) require architectural foundation work now rather than later?
- Priorities: If you could only tackle 2-3 major re-architectures over the next 18 months, which would have the highest impact on our long-term platform advantage?